LIBRARY  ^ 

UNIVERSITY  OP 
CALIFORNIA 
SAN  DIEGO 


THE  ART  OF   LETTERS 


OTHER  WORKS  BY 
THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

Old  and  New  Masters 

The  Passion  of  Labour 

The  Pleasures  of  Ignorance 

Ireland  a  Nation 

If  the  Germans  Conquered  England 

The  Book  of  This  and  That 

Rambles  in  Ireland 

Home  Life  in  Ireland 

Irish  and  English 


THE 
ART    OF    LETTERS 


BY 

ROBERT    LYND 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES   SCRIBNER'S   SONS 
1921 


TO 

J.    C.   SQUIRE 

MY  DEAR  JACK, 

You  were  godfather  to  a  good  many  of  the 
chapters  in  this  book  when  they  first  appeared  in  the 
London  Mercury,  the  New  Statesman,  and  the  British 
Review.  Others  of  the  chapters  appeared  in  the  Daily 
News,  the  Nation,  the  Athena-urn,  the  Observer,  and 
Everyman.  Will  it  embarrass  you  if  I  now  present 
you  with  the  entire  brood  in  the  name  of  a  friendship 
that  has  lasted  many  midnights? 

Yours, 

ROBERT  LYND. 
STEYNING, 

3O//t  August,  1920. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I.  MR.  PEPYS       ........         9 

II.  JOHN  BUNYAN 16 

III.  THOMAS  CAMPION 22 

IV.  JOHN  DONNE 29 

V.  HORACE  WALPOLE .49 

VI.  WILLIAM  COWPER 65 

VII.  A  NOTE  ON  ELIZABETHAN  PLAYS       ...  82 

VIII.  THE  OFFICE  OF  THE  POETS 87 

IX.  EDWARD  YOUNG  AS  CRITIC 93 

X.  GRAY  AND  COLLINS 99 

XI.  ASPECTS  OF  SHELLEY 106 

(1)  THE    CHARACTER    HALF-COMIC    .  .          .        IO6 

(2)  THE   EXPERIMENTALIST          .  .  .  .112 

(3)  THE   POET   OF   HOPE 117 

XII.    THE  WISDOM  OF  COLERIDGE 122 

(1)  COLERIDGE  AS   CRITIC 122 

(2)  COLERIDGE  AS  A  TALKER       .          .          .  .128 

XIII.  TENNYSON:  A  TEMPORARY  CRITICISM        .       .     134 

XIV.  THE  POLITICS  OF  SWIFT  AND  SHAKESPEARE     .     139 

(1)  SWIFT 139 

(2)  SHAKESPEARE 143 

XV.    THE  PERSONALITY  OF  MORRIS      .       .       .       .150 
XVI.    GEORGE  MEREDITH .     156 

(l)    THE  EGOIST I$6 

(l)    THE  OLYMPIAN   UNBENDS    ....        l6o 

(3)  THE  ANGLO-IRISH   ASPECT    .  .          .  .164 


8 

CONTENTS 

PAGE 

XVII. 

OSCAR  WILDE  

.     168 

XVIII. 

Two  ENGLISH  CRITICS  . 

.       1/2 

(l)    MR.  SAINTSBURY   . 

.       172 

(2)    MR.   GOSSE       .... 

...       I78 

XIX. 

AN  AMERICAN  CRITIC  : 

PROFESSOR   IRVING  BABBIT    . 

.       184 

XX. 

GEORGIANS        

IQO 

(  I  )    MR.  DE  LA  MARE   . 

.       IQO 

(2)    THE  GROUP     .... 

.       196 

(3)    THE   YOUNG   SATIRISTS 

.          .          .       199 

XXI. 

LABOUR  OF  AUTHORSHIP 

.       206 

XXII. 

THE  THEORY  OF  POETRY 

.       213 

XXIII. 

THE  CRITIC  AS  DESTROYER    . 

.       .       .     218 

XXIV. 

BOOK  REVIEWING    .... 

.    228 

THE   ART   OF   LETTERS 


I.— MR.  PEPYS 

MR.  PEPYS  was  a  Puritan.  Froude  once  painted  a  portrait 
of  Bunyan  as  an  old  Cavalier.  He  almost  persuaded  one 
that  it  was  true  till  the  later  discovery  of  Bunyan's  name  on 
the  muster-roll  of  one  of  Cromwell's  regiments  showed 
that  he  had  been  a  Puritan  from  the  beginning.  If  one 
calls  Mr.  Pepys  a  Puritan,  however,  one  does  not  do  so 
for  the  love  of  paradox  or  at  a  guess.  He  tells  us  himself 
that  he  "  was  a  great  Roundhead  when  I  was  a  boy,"  and 
that,  on  the  day  on  which  King  Charles  was  beheaded,  he 
said :  "  Were  I  to  preach  on  him,  my  text  should  be — 
'  the  memory  of  the  wicked  shall  rot.' '  After  the  Resto- 
ration he  was  uneasy  lest  his  old  schoolfellow,  Mr.  Christ- 
mas, should  remember  these  strong  words.  True,  when  it 
came  to  the  turn  of  the  Puritans  to  suffer,  he  went,  with  a 
fine  impartiality,  to  see  General  Harrison  disembowelled  at 
Charing  Cross.  "  Thus  it  was  my  chance,"  he  comments, 
"  to  see  the  King  beheaded  at  White  Hall,  and  to  see  the 
first  blood  shed  in  revenge  for  the  blood  of  the  King  at 
Charing  Cross.  From  thence  to  my  Lord's,  and  took  Cap- 
tain Cuttance  and  Mr.  Shepley  to  the  Sun  Tavern,  and  did 
give  them  some  oysters."  Pepys  was  a  spectator  and  a 
gourmet  even  more  than  he  was  a  Puritan.  He  was  a 
Puritan,  indeed,  only  north-north-west.  Even  when  at 
Cambridge  he  gave  evidence  of  certain  susceptibilities  to 
the  sins  of  the  flesh.  He  was  "  admonished  "  on  one  occa- 
sion for  "  having  been  scandalously  overserved  with  drink 
ye  night  before."  He  even  began  to  write  a  romance 
entitled  Love  a  Cheate,  which  he  tore  up  ten  years  later, 
though  he  "  liked  it  very  well."  At  the  same  time  his  writ- 

9 


10  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

ing  never  lost  the  tang  of  Puritan  speech.  "  Blessed  be 
God  "  are  the  first  words  of  his  shocking  Diary.  When 
he  had  to  give  up  keeping  the  Diary  nine  and  a  half  years 
later,  owing  to  failing  sight,  he  wound  up,  after  expressing 
his  intention  of  dictating  in  the  future  a  more  seemly 
journal  to  an  amanuensis,  with  the  characteristic  sentences : 

Or,  if  there  be  anything,  which  cannot  be  much,  now  my  amours 
to  Deb.  are  past,  I  must  endeavour  to  keep  a  margin  in  my  book  open, 
to  add,  here  and  there,  a  note  in  shorthand  with  my  own  hand. 

And  so  I  betake  myself  to  that  course,  which  is  almost  as  much 
as  to  see  myself  go  into  my  grave;  for  which,  and  all  the  discomforts 
that  will  accompany  my  being  blind,  the  good  God  prepare  me. 

With  these  words  the  great  book  ends — the  diary  of  one 
of  the  godliest  and  most  lecherous  of  men. 

In  some  respects  Mr.  Pepys  reminds  one  of  a  type  that 
is  now  commoner  in  Scotland,  I  fancy,  than  elsewhere.  He 
himself  seems  at  one  time  to  have  taken  the  view  that  he 
was  of  Scottish  descent.  None  of  the  authorities,  however, 
will  admit  this,  and  there  is  apparently  no  doubt  that  he 
belonged  to  an  old  Cambridgeshire  family  that  had  come 
down  in  the  world,  his  father  having  dwindled  into  a  Lon- 
don tailor.  In  temperament,  however,  he  seems  to  me  to 
have  been  more  Scottish  than  the  very  Scottish  Boswell. 
He  led  a  double  life  with  the  same  simplicity  of  heart. 
He  was  Scottish  in  the  way  in  which  he  lived  with  one 
eye  on  the  "  lassies  "  and  the  other  on  "  the  meenister."  He 
was  notoriously  respectable,  notoriously  hard-working,  a 
judge  of  sermons,  fond  of  the  bottle,  cautious,  thrifty.  He 
had  all  the  virtues  of  a  K.C.B.  He  was  no  scapegrace  or 
scallywag  such  as  you  might  find  nowadays  crowing  over 
his  sins-  in  Chelsea.  He  lived,  so  far  as  the  world  was  con- 
cerned, in  the  complete  starch  of  rectitude.  He  was  a  pillar 
of  Society,  and  whatever  age  he  had  been  born  in,  he  would 
have  accepted  its  orthodoxy.  He  was  as  grave  a  man  as 
Holy  Willie.  Stevenson  has  commented  on  the  gradual 
decline  of  his  primness  in  the  later  years  of  the  Diary. 
"His  favourite  ejaculation,  'Lord!'  occurs,"  he  declares, 


MR.  PEPYS  11 


"  but  once  that  I  have  observed  in  1660,  never  in  '61,  twice 
in  '62,  and  at  least  five  times  in  '63;  after  which  the 
'  Lords '  may  be  said  to  pullulate  like  herrings,  with  here 
and  there  a  solitary  '  damned/  as  it  were  a  whale  among 
the  shoal."  As  a  matter  of  fact,  Mr.  Pepys's  use  of  the  ex- 
pression "  Lord !  "  has  been  greatly  exaggerated,  especially 
by  the  parodists.  His  primness,  if  that  is  the  right  word, 
never  altogether  deserted  him.  We  discover  this  even  in  the 
story  of  his  relations  with  women.  In  1665,  for  instance, 
he  writes  with  surprised  censoriousness  of  Mrs.  Penington : 

There  we  drank  and  laughed  [he  relates],  and  she  willingly  suffered 
me  to  put  my  hand  in  her  bosom  very  wantonly,  and  keep  it  there 
long.  Which  methought  was  very  strange,  and  I  looked  upon  myself 
as  a  man  mightily  deceived  in  a  lady,  for  I  could  not  have  thought 
she  could  have  suffered  it  by  her  former  discourse  with  me ;  so  modest 
she  seemed  and  I  know  not  what. 

It  is  a  sad  world  for  idealists. 

Mr.  Pepys's  Puritanism,  however,  was  something  less 
than  Mr.  Pepys.  It  was  but  a  pair  of  creaking  Sunday 
boots  on  the  feet  of  a  pagan.  Mr.  Pepys  was  an  appre- 
ciator  of  life  to  a  degree  that  not  many  Englishmen  have 
been  since  Chaucer.  He  was  a  walking  appetite.  And  not 
an  entirely  ignoble  appetite  either.  He  reminds  one  in  some 
respects  of  the  poet  in  Browning's  "  How  it  strikes  a  Con- 
temporary," save  that  he  had  more  worldly  success.  One 
fancies  him  with  the  same  inquisitive  ferrule  on  the  end 
of  his  stick,  the  same  "  scrutinizing  hat,"  the  same  eye  for 
the  bookstall  and  "  the  man  who  slices  lemon  into  drink." 
"  If  any  cursed  a  woman,  he  took  note."  Browning's 
poet,  however,  apparently  "  took  note "  on  behalf  of  a 
higher  power.  It  is  difficult  to  imagine  Mr.  Pepys  sending 
his  Diary  to  the  address  of  the  Recording  Angel.  Rather, 
the  Diary  is  the  soliloquy  of  an  egoist,  disinterested  and 
daring  as  a  bad  boy's  reverie  over  the  fire. 

Nearly  all  those  who  have  written  about  Pepys  are  per- 
plexed by  the  question  whether  Pepys  wrote  his  Diary  with 
a  view  to  its  ultimate  publication.  This  seems  to  me  to 
betray  some  ignorance  of  the  working  of  the  human  mind. 


12  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

Those  who  find  one  of  the  world's  puzzles  in  the  fact 
that  Mr.  Pepys  wrapped  his  great  book  in  the  secrecy  of  a 
cipher,  as  though  he  meant  no  other  eye  ever  to  read  it  but 
his  own,  perplex  their  brains  unnecessarily.  Pepys  was  not 
the  first  human  being  to  make  his  confession  in  an  empty 
confessional.  Criminals,  lovers  and  other  egoists,  for  lack 
of  a  priest,  will  make  their  confessions  to  a  stone  wall  or 
a  tree.  There  is  no  more  mystery  in  it  than  in  the  singing 
of  birds.  The  motive  may  be  either  to  obtain  discharge 
from  the  sense  of  guilt  or  a  desire  to  save  and  store  up  the 
very  echoes  and  last  drops  of  pleasure.  Human  beings  keep 
diaries  for  as  many  different  reasons  as  they  write  lyric 
poems.  With  Pepys,  I  fancy,  the  main  motive  was  a  simple 
happiness  in  chewing  the  cud  of  pleasure.  The  fact  that 
so  much  of  his  pleasure  had  to  be  kept  secret  from  the 
world  made  it  all  the  more  necessary  for  him  to  babble  when 
alone.  True,  in  the  early  days  his  confidences  are  innocent 
enough.  Pepys  began  to  write  in  cipher  some  time  before 
there  was  any  purpose  in  it  save  the  common  prudence  of 
a  secretive  man.  Having  built,  however,  this  secret  and 
solitary  fastness,  he  gradually  became  more  daring.  He 
had  discovered  a  room  to  the  walls  of  which  he  dared  speak 
aloud.  Here  we  see  the  respectable  man  liberated.  He  no 
longer  needs  to  be  on  his  official  behaviour,  but  may  play 
the  part  of  a  small  Nero,  if  he  wishes,  behind  the  safety 
of  shorthand.  And  how  he  takes  advantage  of  his  oppor- 
tunities !  He  remains  to  the  end  something  of  a  Puritan  in 
his  standards  and  his  public  carriage,  but  in  his  diary  he 
reveals  himself  as  a  pig  from  the  sty  of  Epicurus,  naked 
and  only  half-ashamed.  He  never,  it  must  be  admitted, 
entirely  shakes  off  his  timidity.  At  a  crisis  he  dare 
not  confess  in  English  even  in  a  cipher,  but  puts  the 
worst  in  bad  French  with  a  blush.  In  some  instances  the 
French  may  be  for  facetiousness  rather  than  concealment, 
as  in  the  reference  to  the  ladies  of  Rochester  Castle  in 
1665: 

Thence    to    Rochester,    walked    to    the    Crowne,    and    while   dinner 
was  getting  ready,   I   did  then  walk  to  visit  the  old   Castle   ruines, 


MR.  PEPYS  13 


which  hath  been  a  noble  place,  and  there  going  up  I  did  upon 
the  stairs  overtake  three  pretty  mayds  or  women  and  took  them 
up  with  me,  and  I  did  baiser  sur  mouches  et  toucher  leur  mains 
and  necks  to  my  great  pleasure ;  but  lord !  to  see  what  a  dreadfull 
thing  it  is  to  look  down  the  precipices,  for  it  did  fright  me 
mightily,  and  hinder  me  of  much  pleasure  which  I  would  have 
made  to  myself  in  the  company  of  these  three,  if  it  had  not  been 
for  that. 

Even  here,  however,  Mr.  Pepys's  French  has  a  suggestion 
of  evasion.  He  always  had  a  faint  hope  that  his  conscience 
would  not  understand  French. 

Some  people  have  written  as  though  Mr.  Pepys,  in  con- 
fessing himself  in  his  Diary,  had  confessed  us  all.  They 
profess  to  see  in  the  Diary  simply  the  image  of  Everyman 
in  his  bare  skin.  They  think  of  Pepys  as  an  ordinary  man 
who  wrote  an  extraordinary  book.  To  me  it  seems  that 
Pepys's  Diary  is  not  more  extraordinary  as  a  book  than 
Pepys  himself  is  as  a  man.  Taken  separately,  nine  out  of 
ten  of  his  characteristics  may  seem  ordinary  enough — his 
fears,  his  greeds,  his  vices,  his  utilitarian  repentances.  They 
were  compounded  in  him,  however,  in  such  proportion  as 
to  produce  an  entirely  new  mixture — a  character  hardly  less 
original  than  Dr.  Johnson  or  Charles  Lamb.  He  had  not 
any  great  originality  of  virtue,  as  these  others  had,  but  he 
was  immensely  original  in  his  responsiveness — his  capacity 
for  being  interested,  tempted  and  pleased.  The  voluptuous 
nature  of  the  man  may  be  seen  in  such  a  passage  as  that 
in  which,  speaking  of  "  the  wind-musique  when  the  angel 
comes  down  "  in  The  Virgin  Martyr,  he  declares : 

It  ravished  me,  and  indeed,  in  a  word,  did  wrap  up  my  soul  so  that 
it  made  me  really  sick,  just  as  I  have  formerly  been  when  in  love 
with  my  wife. 

Writing  of  Mrs.  Knipp  on  another  occasion,  he  says : 

She  and  I  singing,  and  God  forgive  me!  I  do  still  see  that  my 
nature  is  not  to  be  quite  conquered,  but  will  esteem  pleasure  above 
all  things,  though  yet  in  the  middle  of  it,  it  has  reluctances  after  my 
business,  which  is  neglected  by  my  following  my  pleasure.  However, 
musique  and  women  I  cannot  but  give  way  to,  whatever  my  busi- 
ness is. 


14  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

Within  a  few  weeks  of  this  we  find  him  writing  again: 

So  abroad  to  my  ruler's  of  my  books,  having,  God  forgive  me ! 
a  mind  to  see  Nan  there,  which  I  did,  and  so  back  again,  and  then 
out  again  to  see  Mrs.  Bettons,  who  were  looking  out  of  the  window 
as  I  came  through  Fenchurch  Streete.  So  that,  indeed,  I  am  not,  as 
I  ought  to  be,  able  to  command  myself  in  the  pleasures  of  my  eye. 

Though  page  after  page  of  the  Diary  reveals  Mr.  Pepys  as 
an  extravagant  pleasure-lover,  however,  he  differed  from 
the  majority  of  pleasure-lovers  in  literature  in  not  being  a 
man  of  taste.  He  had  a  rolling  rather  than  a  fastidious 
eye.  He  kissed  promiscuously,  and  was  not  aspiring  in  his 
lusts.  He  once  held  Lady  Castlemaine  in  his  arms,  indeed, 
but  it  was  in  a  dream.  He  reflected,  he  tells  us, 

that  since  it  was  a  dream,  and  that  I  took  so  much  real  pleasure  in 
it,  what  a  happy  thing  it  would  be  if  when  we  are  in  our  graves  (as 
Shakespeare  resembles  it)  we  could  dream,  and  dream  but  such 
dreams  as  this,  that  then  we  should  not  need  to  be  so  fearful  of 
death,  as  we  are  this  plague  time. 

He  praises  this  dream  at  the  same  time  as  "  the  best  that 
ever  was  dreamt."  Mr.  Pepys's  idea  of  Paradise,  it  would 
be  seen,  was  that  commonly  attributed  to  the  Moham- 
medans. Meanwhile  he  did  his  best  to  turn  London  into 
an  anticipatory  harem.  We  get  a  pleasant  picture  of  a 
little  Roundhead  Sultan  in  such  a  sentence  as  "  At  night 
had  Mercer  comb  my  head  and  so  to  supper,  sing  a  psalm 
and  to  bed." 

It  may  seem  unfair  to  over-emphasize  the  voluptuary  in 
Mr.  Pepys,  but  it  is  Mr.  Pepys,  the  promiscuous  amourist, 
stringing  his  lute  (God  forgive  him!)  on  a  Sunday,  that  is 
the  outstanding  figure  in  the  Diary.  Mr.  Pepys  attracts  us, 
however,  in  a  host  of  other  aspects — Mr.  Pepys  whose  nose 
his  jealous  wife  attacked  with  the  red-hot  tongs  as  he  lay 
in  bed;  Mr.  Pepys  who  always  held  an  anniversary  feast 
on  the  date  on  which  he  had  been  cut  for  the  stone;  Mr. 
Pepys  who  was  not  "  troubled  at  it  at  all  "  as  soon  as  he 
saw  that  the  lady  who  had  spat  on  him  in  the  theatre  was  a 
pretty  one;  Mr.  Pepys  drinking;  Mr.  Pepys  among  his 


MB.  PEPY8  15 

dishes;  Mr.  Pepys  among  princes;  Mr.  Pepys  who  was 
"  mightily  pleased  "  as  he  listened  to  "  my  aunt  Jenny,  a 
poor,  religious,  well-meaning  good  soul,  talking  of  nothing 
but  God  Almighty  " ;  Mr.  Pepys,  as  he  counts  up  his  bless- 
ings in  wealth,  women,  honour  and  life,  and  decides  that 
"  all  these  things  are  ordered  by  God  Almighty  to  make  me 
contented  " ;  Mr.  Pepys  as,  having  just  refused  to  see  Lady 
Pickering,  he  comments,  "  But  how  natural  it  is  for  us  to 
slight  people  out  of  power !  " ;  Mr.  Pepys  who  groans  as  he 
sees  his  office  clerks  sitting  in  more  expensive  seats  than 
himself  at  the  theatre.  Mr.  Pepys  is  a  man  so  many-sided, 
indeed,  that  in  order  to  illustrate  his  character  one  would 
have  to  quote  the  greater  part  of  his  Diary.  He  is  a  mass 
of  contrasts  and  contradictions.  He  lives  without  sequence 
except  in  the  business  of  getting-on  (in  which  he  might  well 
have  been  taken  as  a  model  by  Samuel  Smiles).  One 
thinks  of  him  sometimes  as  a  sort  of  Deacon  Brodie,  some- 
times as  the  most  innocent  sinner  who  ever  lived.  For, 
though  he  was  brutal  and  snobbish  and  self-seeking  and 
simian,  he  had  a  pious  and  a  merry  and  a  grateful  heart. 
He  felt  that  God  had  created  the  world  for  the  pleasure 
of  Samuel  Pepys,  and  had  no  doubt  that  it  was  good. 


IL— JOHN  BUNYAN 

ONCE,  when  John  Bunyan  had  been  preaching  in  London, 
a  friend  congratulated  him  on  the  excellence  of  his  sermon. 
"  You  need  not  remind  me  of  that,"  replied  Bunyan.  "  The 
Devil  told  me  of  it  before  I  was  out  of  the  pulpit."  On 
another  occasion,  when  he  was  going  about  in  disguise,  a 
constable  who  had  a  warrant  for  his  arrest  spoke  to  him  and 
inquired  if  he  knew  that  devil  Bunyan.  "Know  him?" 
said  Bunyan.  "  You  might  call  him  a  devil  if  you  knew 
him  as  well  as  I  once  did."  We  have  in  these  anecdotes 
a  key  to  the  nature  of  Bunyan's  genius.  He  was  a  realist, 
a  romanticist,  and  a  humourist.  He  was  as  exact  a  realist 
(though  in  a  different  way)  as  Mr.  Pepys,  whose  contem- 
porary he  was.  He  was  a  realist  both  in  his  self-knowledge 
and  in  his  sense  of  the  outer  world.  He  had  the  acute  eye 
of  the  artist  which  was  aware  of  the  stones  of  the  street 
and  the  crows  in  the  ploughed  field.  As  a  preacher,  he  did 
not  guide  the  thoughts  of  his  hearers,  as  so  many  preachers 
do,  into  the  wind.  He  recalled  them  from  orthodox  abstrac- 
tions to  the  solid  earth.  "  Have  you  forgot,"  he  asked  his 
followers,  "  the  close,  the  milk-house,  the  stable,  the  barn, 
and  the  like,  where  God  did  visit  your  souls?  "  He  himself 
could  never  be  indifferent  to  the  place  or  setting  of  the 
great  tragi-comedy  of  salvation.  When  he  relates  how  he 
gave  up  swearing  as  a  result  of  a  reproof  from  a  "  loose 
and  ungodly  "  woman,  he  begins  the  story :  "  One  day,  as 
I  was  standing  at  a  neighbour's  shop-window,  and  there 
cursing  and  swearing  after  my  wonted  manner,  there  sat 
within  the  woman  of  the  house,  who  heard  me."  This 
passion  for  locality  was  always  at  his  elbow.  A  few  pages 
further  on  in  Grace  Abounding,  when  he  tells  us  how  he 
abandoned  not  only  swearing  but  the  deeper-rooted  sins  of 
bell-ringing  and  dancing,  and  nevertheless  remained  self- 

16 


JOHN  BUNYAN  17 


righteous  and  "  ignorant  of  Jesus  Christ,"  he  introduces 
the  next  episode  in  the  story  of  his  conversion  with  the 
sentence :  "  But  upon  a  day  the  good  providence  of  God 
called  me  to  Bedford  to  work  at  my  calling,  and  in  one  of 
the  streets  of  that  town  I  came  where  there  were  three  or 
four  poor  women  sitting  at  a  door  in  the  sun,  talking  about 
the  things  of  God."  That  seems  to  me  to  be  one  of  the 
most  beautiful  sentences  in  English  literature.  Its  beauty 
is  largely  due  to  the  hungry  eyes  with  which  Bunyan  looked 
at  the  present  world  during  his  progress  to  the  next.  If 
he  wrote  the  greatest  allegory  in  English  literature,  it  is 
because  he  was  able  to  give  his  narrative  the  reality  of  a 
travel-book  instead  of  the  insubstantial  quality  of  a  dream. 
He  leaves  the  reader  with  the  feeling  that  he  is  moving 
among  real  places  and  real  people.  As  for  the  people, 
Bunyan  can  give  even  an  abstract  virtue — still  more,  an 
abstract  vice — the  skin  and  bones  of  a  man.  A  recent  critic 
has  said  disparagingly  that  Bunyan  would  have  called 
Hamlet  Mr.  Facing-both-ways.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
Bunyan's  secret  is  the  direct  opposite  of  this.  His  great 
and  singular  gift  was  the  power  to  create  an  atmosphere  in 
which  a  character  with  a  name  like  Mr.  Facing-both-ways 
is  accepted  on  the  same  plane  of  reality  as  Hamlet. 

If  Bunyan  was  a  realist,  however,  as  regards  place  and 
character,  his  conception  of  life  was  none  the  less  romantic. 
Life  to  him  was  a  story  of  hairbreadth  escapes — of  a  quest 
beset  with  a  thousand  perils.  Not  only  was  there  that  great 
dragon  the  Devil  lying  in  wait  for  the  traveller,  but  there 
was  Doubting  Castle  to  pass,  and  Giant  Despair,  and  the 
lions.  We  have  in  The  Pilgrim's  Progress  almost  every 
property  of  romantic  adventure  and  terror.  We  want  only 
a  map  in  order  to  bring  home  to  us  the  fact  that  it  belongs 
to  the  same  school  of  fiction  as  Treasure  Island.  There 
may  be  theological  contentions  here  and  there  that  interrupt 
the  action  of  the  story  as  they  interrupt  the  interest  of 
Grace  Abounding.  But  the  tedious  passages  are  extraor- 
dinarily few,  considering  that  the  author  had  the  passions 
of  a  preacher.  No  doubt  the  fact  that,  when  he  wrote  The 


18  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

Pilgrim's  Progress,  he  was  not  definitely  thinking  of  the 
edification  of  his  neighbours,  goes  far  towards  explaining 
the  absence  of  commonplace  arguments  and  exhortations. 
"  I  did  it  mine  own  self  to  gratify,"  he  declared  in  his 
rhymed  "  apology  for  his  book."  Later  on,  in  reply  to 
some  brethren  of  the  stricter  sort  who  condemned  such 
dabbling  in  fiction,  he  defended  his  book  as  a  tract,  remark- 
ing that,  if  you  want  to  catch  fish, 

They  must  be  groped  for,  and  be  tickled  too, 
Or  they  will  not  be  catch't,  whate'er  you  do. 

But  in  its  origin  The  Pilgrim's  Progress  was  not  a  tract, 
but  the  inevitable  image  of  the  experiences  of  the  writer's 
soul.  And  what  wild  adventures  those  were  every  reader 
of  Grace  Abounding  knows.  There  were  terrific  contests 
with  the  Devil,  who  could  never  charm  John  Bttnyan  as  he 
charmed  Eve.  To  Bunyan  these  contests  were  not  meta- 
phorical battles,  but  were  as  struggles  with  flesh  and  blood. 
"  He  pulled,  and  I  pulled,"  he  'wrote  in  one  place ;  "  but, 
God  be  praised,  I  overcame  him — I  got  sweetness  from  it." 
And  the  Devil  not  only  fought  him  openly,  but  made  more 
subtle  attempts  to  entice  him  to  sin.  "  Sometimes,  again, 
when  I  have  been  preaching,  I  have  been  violently  assaulted 
with  thoughts  of  blasphemy,  and  strongly  tempted  to 
speak  the  words  with  my  mouth  before  the  congregation." 
Bunyan,  as  he  looked  back  over  the  long  record  of  his 
spiritual  torments,  thought  of  it  chiefly  as  a  running  fight 
with  the  Devil.  Outside  the  covers  of  the  Bible,  little 
existed  save  temptations  for  the  soul.  No  sentence  in  The 
Pilgrim's  Progress  is  more  suggestive  of  Bunyan's  view  of 
life  than  that  in  which  the  merchandise  of  Vanity  Fair  is 
described  as  including  "  delights  of  all  sorts,  as  whores, 
bawds,  wives,  husbands,  children,  masters,  servants,  lives, 
blood,  bodies,  souls,  silver,  gold,  pearls,  precious  stones, 
and  what  not."  It  is  no  wonder  that  one  to  whom  so  much 
of  the  common  life  of  man  was  simply  Devil's  traffic  took  a 
tragic  view  of  even  the  most  innocent  pleasures,  and  applied 
to  himself,  on  account  of  his  love  of  strong  language, 


JOHN  BUNYAN  19 


Sunday  sports  and  bell-ringing,  epithets  that  would  hardly 
have  been  too  strong  if  he  had  committed  all  the  crimes  of 
the  latest  Bluebeard.  He  himself,  indeed,  seems  to  have 
become  alarmed  when — probably  as  a  result  of  his  own 
confessions — it  began  to  be  rumoured  that  he  was  a  man 
with  an  unspeakable  past.  He  now  demanded  that  "  any 
woman  in  heaven,  earth  or  hell  "  should  be  produced  with 
whom  he  had  ever  had  relations  before  his  marriage.  "  My 
foes,"  he  declared,  "  have  missed  their  mark  in  this  shoot- 
ing at  me.  I  am  not  the  man.  I  wish  that  they  themselves 
be  guiltless.  If  all  the  fornicators  and  adulterers  in  Eng- 
land were  hanged  up  by  the  neck  till  they  be  dead,  John 
Bunyan,  the  object  of  their  envy,  would  still  be  alive  and 
well."  Bunyan,  one  observes,  was  always  as  ready  to  de- 
fend as  to  attack  himself.  The  verses  he  prefixed  to  The 
Holy  War  are  an  indignant  reply  to  those  who  accused  him 
of  not  being  the  real  author  of  The  Pilgrim's  Progress.  He 
wound  up  a  fervent  defence  of  his  claims  to  originality  by 
pointing  out  the  fact  that  his  name,  if  "  anagrammed," 
made  the  words :  "  NU  HONY  IN  A  B."  Many  worse  argu- 
ments have  been  used  in  the  quarrels  of  theologians. 

Bunyan  has  been  described  as  a  tall,  red-haired  man, 
stern  of  countenance,  quick  of  eye,  and  mild  of  speech. 
His  mildness  of  speech,  I  fancy,  must  have  been  an  acquired 
mildness.  He  loved  swearing  as  a  boy,  and,  as  The  Pil- 
grim's Progress  shows,  even  in  his  later  life  he  had  not  lost 
the  humour  of  calling  names.  No  other  English  author 
has  ever  invented  a  name  of  the  labelling  kind  equal  to  that 
of  Mr.  Worldly  Wiseman — a  character,  by  the  way,  who 
does  not  appear  in  the  first  edition  of  The  Pilgrim's  Prog- 
ress, but  came  in  later  as  an  afterthought.  Congreve's 
"  Tribulation  Spintext  "  and  Dickens's  .  "  Lord  Frederick 
Verisopht "  are  mere  mechanical  contrivances  compared  to 
this  triumph  of  imagination  and  phrase.  Bunyan's  gift  for 
names  was  in  its  kind  supreme.  His  humorous  fancy 
chiefly  took  that  form.  Even  atheists  can  read  him  with 
pleasure  for  the  sake  of  his  names.  The  modern  reader,  no 
doubt,  often  smiles  at  these  names  where  Bunyan  did  not 


20  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

mean  him  to  smile,  as  when  Mrs.  Lightmind  says :  "  I  was 
yesterday  at  Madam  Wantons,  when  we  were  as  merry  as 
the  maids.  For  who  do  you  think  should  be  there  but  I  and 
Mrs.  Love-the-flesh,  and  three  or  four  more,  with  Mr. 
Lechery,  Mrs.  Filth,  and  some  others  ?  "  Bunyan's  f anci- 
fulness,  however,  gives  us  pleasure  quite  apart  from  such 
quaint  effects  as  this.  How  delightful  is  Mr.  By-ends's 
explanation  of  the  two  points  in  regard  to  which  he  and 
his  family  differ  in  religion  from  those  of  the  stricter  sort : 
"  First,  we  never  strive  against  wind  and  tide.  Secondly, 
we  are  always  most  zealous  when  Religion  goes  in  his 
silver  slippers ;  we  love  much  to  walk  with  him  in  the  street, 
if  the  sun  shines,  and  the  people  applaud  him."  What  a 
fine  grotesque,  again,  Bunyan  gives  us  in  toothless  Giant 
Pope  sitting  in  the  mouth  of  the  cave,  and,  though  too 
feeble  to  follow  Christian,  calling  out  after  him :  "  You  will 
never  mend  till  more  of  you  be  burnt."  We  do  not  read 
The  Pilgrim's  Progress,  however,  as  a  humorous  book. 
Bunyan's  pains  mean  more  to  us  than  the  play  of  his  fancy. 
His  books  are  not  seventeenth-century  grotesques,  but  the 
story  of  his  heart.  He  has  written  that  story  twice  over — 
with  the  gloom  of  the  realist  in  Grace  Abounding,  and  with 
the  joy  of  the  artist  in  The  Pilgrim's  Progress.  Even  in 
Grace  Abounding,  however,  much  as  it  is  taken  up  with  a 
tale  of  almost  lunatic  terror,  the  tenderness  of  Bunyan's 
nature  breaks  out  as  he  tells  us  how,  when  he  was  taken 
off  to  prison,  "  the  parting  with  my  wife  and  four  children 
hath  often  been  to  me  in  the  place  as  the  pulling  the  flesh 
from  the  bones  .  .  .  especially  my  poor  blind  child,  who 
lay  nearer  my  heart  than  all  beside.  Oh,  the  thoughts  of 
the  hardship  I  thought  my  poor  blind  one  might  go  under 
would  break  my  heart  to  pieces !  "  At  the  same  time,  fear 
and  not  love  is  the  dominating  passion  in  Grace  Abounding. 
We  are  never  far  from  the  noise  of  Hell  in  its  pages.  In 
Grace  Abounding  man  is  a  trembling  criminal.  In  The  Pil- 
grim's Progress  he  has  become,  despite  his  immense  capacity 
for  fear,  a  hero.  The  description  of  the  fight  with  Apollyon 
is  a  piece  of  heroic  literature  equal  to  anything  in  those 


JOHN  BUNYAN  21 


romances  of  adventure  that  went  to  the  head  of  Don 
Quixote.  "  But,  as  God  would  have  it,  while  Apollyon  was 
fetching  his  last  blow,  thereby  to  make  a  full  end  of  this 
good  man,  Christian  nimbly  reached  out  his  hand  for  his 
sword,  and  caught  it,  saying:  '  Rejoice  not  against  me,  O 
mine  enemy !  when  I  fall  I  shall  arise ' ;  and  with  that  gave 
him  a  deadly  thrust,  which  made  him  give  back,  as  one 
that  had  received  a  mortal  wound."  Heroic  literature  can- 
not surpass  this.  Its  appeal  is  universal.  When  one  reads 
it,  one  ceases  to  wonder  that  there  exists  even  a  Catholic 
version  of  The  Pilgrim's  Progress,  in  which  Giant  Pope 
is  discreetly  omitted,  but  the  heroism  of  Christian  remains. 
Bunyan  disliked  being  called  by  the  name  of  any  sect.  His 
imagination  was  certainly  as  little  sectarian  as  that  of  a 
seventeenth-century  preacher  could  well  be.  His  hero  is 
primarily  not  a  Baptist,  but  a  man.  He  bears,  perhaps, 
almost  too  close  a  resemblance  to  Everyman,  but  his 
journey,  his  adventures  and  his  speech  save  him  from  sink- 
ing into  a  pulpit  generalization. 


III.— THOMAS  CAMPION 

THOMAS  CAMPION  is  among  English  poets  the  perfect 
minstrel.  He  takes  love  as  a  theme  rather  than  is  burned 
by  it.  His  most  charming,  if  not  his  most  beautiful  poem 
begins:  "  Hark,  all  you  ladies."  He  sings  of  love-making 
rather  than  of  love.  His  poetry,  like  Moore's — though  it  is 
infinitely  better  poetry  than  Moore's — is  the  poetry  of  flir- 
tation. Little  is  known  about  his  life,  but  one  may  infer 
from  his  work  that  his  range  of  amorous  experience  was 
rather  wide  than  deep.  There  is  no  lady  "  with  two  pitch 
balls  stuck  in  her  face  for  eyes  "  troubling  his  pages  with  a 
constant  presence.  The  Mellea  and  Caspia — the  one  too 
easy  of  capture,  the  other  too  difficult — to  whom  so  many  of 
the  Latin  epigrams  are  addressed,  are  said  to  have  been  his 
chief  schoolmistresses  in  love.  But  he  has  buried  most  of 
his  erotic  woes,  such  as  they  were,  in  a  dead  language.  His 
English  poems  do  not  portray  him  as  a  man  likely  to  die  of 
love,  or  even  to  forget  a  meal  on  account  of  it.  His  world  is 
a  happy  land  of  song,  in  which  ladies  all  golden  in  the 
sunlight  succeed  one  another  as  in  a  pageant  of  beauties. 
Lesbia,  Laura,  and  Corinna  with  her  lute  equally  inhabit  it. 
They  are  all  characters  in  a  masque  of  love,  forms  and 
figures  in  a  revel.  Their  maker  is  an  Epicurean  and  an 
enemy  to  "  the  sager  sort  "  : 

My  sweetest  Lesbia,  let  us  live  and  love, 

And,  though  the  sager  sort  our  deeps  reprove, 

Let  us  not  weigh  them.     Heav'n's  great  lamps  do  dive 

Into  their  west,  and  straight  again  revive. 

But,  soon  as  once  is  set  our  little  light, 

Then  must  we  sleep  our  ever-during  night. 

Ladies  in  so  bright  and  insecure  a  day  must  not  be  permitted 
to  "  let  their  lovers  moan."  If  they  do,  they  will  incur  the 
just  vengeance  of  the  Fairy  Queen  Proserpina,  who  will 

22 


THOMAS  CAMPION  23 

send  her  attendant  fairies  to  pinch  their  white  hands  and 
pitiless  arms.  Campion  is  the  Fairy  Queen's  court  poet. 
He  claims  all  men — perhaps,  one  ought  rather  to  say  all 
women — as  her  subjects : 

In  myrtle  arbours  on  the  downs 

The  Fairy  Queen  Proserpina, 
This  night  by  moonshine  leading  merry  rounds, 

Holds  a  watch  with  sweet  love, 
Down  the  dale,  up  the  hill ; 

No  plaints  or  groans  may  move 
Their  holy  vigil. 

All  you  that  will  hold  watch  with  love, 

The  Fairy  Queen  Proserpina 
Will  make  you  fairer  than  Dione's  dove ; 

Roses  red,  lilies  white 
And  the  clear  damask  hue, 

Shall  on  your  cheeks  alight: 
Love  will  adorn  you. 

All  you  that  love,  or  lov'd  before, 

The  Fairy  Queen  Proserpina 
Bids  you  increase  that  loving  humour  more : 

They  that  have  not  fed 
On  delight  amorous, 

She  vows  that  they  shall  lead 
Apes  in  Avernus. 

It  would  be  folly  to  call  the  poem  that  contains  these  three 
verses  one  of  the  great  English  love-songs.  It  gets  no 
nearer  love  than  a  ballet  does.  There  are  few  lyrics  of 
"  delight  amorous  "  in  English,  however,  that  can  compare 
with  it  in  exquisite  fancy  and  still  more  exquisite  music. 

Campion,  at  the  same  time,  if  he  was  the  poet  of  the 
higher  flirtation,  was  no  mere  amorous  jester,  as  Moore  was. 
His  affairs  of  the  heart  were  also  affairs  of  the  imagination. 
Love  may  not  have  transformed  the  earth  for  him,  as  it  did 
Shakespeare  and  Donne  and  Browning,  but  at  least  it  trans- 
formed his  accents.  He  sang  neither  the  "De  Profundis  " 
of  love  nor  the  triumphal  ode  of  love  that  increases  from 
anniversary  to  anniversary;  but  he  knew  the  flying  sun  and 
shadow  of  romantic  love,  and  staged  them  in  music  of  a 
delicious  sadness,  of  a  fantastic  and  playful  gravity.  His 


24  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

poems,  regarded  as  statements  of  fact,  are  a  little  insincere. 
They  are  the  compliments,  not  the  confessions,  of  a  lover. 
He  exaggerates  the  burden  of  his  sigh,  the  incurableness  of 
his  wounded  heart.  But  beneath  these  conventional  excesses 
there  is  a  flow  of  sincere  and  beautiful  feeling.  He  may  not 
have  been  a  worshipper,  but  his  admirations  were  golden. 
In  one  or  two  of  his  poems,  such  as : 

Follow  your  saint,  follow  with  accents  sweet; 
Haste  you,  sad  notes,  fall  at  her  flying  feet, 

admiration  treads  on  the  heels  of  worship. 

All  that  I  sung  still  to  her  praise  did  tend; 
Still  she  was  first,  still  she  my  song  did  end — 

in  these  lines  we  find  a  note  of  triumphant  fidelity  rare  in 
Campion's  work.  Compared  with  this,  that  other  song 
beginning : 

Follow  thy  fair  sun,  unhappy  shadow, 

Though  thou  be  black  as  night, 

And  she  made  all  of  light, 

Yet  follow  thy  fair  sun,  unhappy  shadow — 

seems  but  the  ultimate  perfection  among  valentines.  Others 
of  the  songs  hesitate  between  compliment  and  the  finer 
ecstasy.  The  compliment  is  certainly  of  the  noblest  in  the 
lyric  which  sets  out — 

When  thou  must  home  to  shades  of  underground, 

And,  there  arriv'd,  a  new  admired  guest, 

The  beauteous  spirits  do  ingirt  thee  round, 

White  lope,  blithe  Helen,  and  the  rest, 

To  hear  the  stories  of  thy  finisht  love 

From  that  smooth  tongue  whose  music  hell  can  move ; 

but  it  fades  by  way  of  beauty  into  the  triviality  of  conven- 
tion in  the  second  verse: 

Then  wilt  thou  speak  of  banqueting  delights, 
Of  masks  and  revels  which  sweet  youth  did  make, 
Of  tourneys  and  great  challenges  of  knights, 
And  all  these  triumphs  for  thy  beauty's  sake: 
When  thou  hast  told  these  honours  done  to  thee, 
Then  tell,  O  tell,  how  thou  didst  murther  me. 


THOMAS  CAMPION  25 

There  is  more  of  jest  than  of  sorrow  in  the  last  line.  It  is 
an  act  of  courtesy.  Through  all  these  songs,  however,  there 
is  a  continuous  expense  of  beauty,  of  a  very  fortune  of 
admiration,  that  entitles  Campion  to  a  place  above  any 
of  the  other  contemporaries  of  Shakespeare  as  a  writer  of 
songs.  His  dates  (1567-1620)  almost  coincide  with  those 
of  Shakespeare.  Living  in  an  age  of  music,  he  wrote  music 
that  Shakespeare  alone  could  equal  and  even  Shakespeare 
could  hardly  surpass.  Campion's  words  are  themselves 
airs.  They  give  us  at  once  singer  and  song  and  stringed 
instrument. 

It  is  only  in  music,  however,  that  Campion  is  in  any  way 
comparable  to  Shakespeare.  Shakespeare  is  the  nonpareil 
among  song-writers,  not  merely  because  of  his  music,  but 
because  of  the  imaginative  riches  that  he  pours  out  in  his 
songs.  In  contrast  with  his  abundance,  Campion's  fortune 
seems  lean,  like  his  person.  Campion  could  not  see  the 
world  for  lovely  ladies.  Shakespeare  in  his  lightest  songs 
was  always  aware  of  the  abundant  background  of  the  visible 
world.  Campion  seems  scarcely  to  know  of  the  existence  of 
the  world  apart  from  the  needs  of  a  masque-writer.  Among 
his  songs  there  is  nothing  comparable  to  "  When  daisies 
pied  and  violets  blue,"  or  "  Where  the  bee  sucks,"  or  "  You 
spotted  snakes  with  double  tongue,"  or  "  When  daffodils 
begin  to  peer,"  or  "  Full  fathom  five,"  or  "  Fear  no  more 
the  heat  o'  the  sun."  He  had  neither  Shakespeare's  eye  nor 
Shakespeare's  experiencing  soul.  He  puts  no  girdle  round 
the  world  in  his  verse.  He  knows  but  one  mood  and  its 
sub-moods.  Though  he  can  write 

There  is  a  garden  in  her  face, 
Where  roses  and  white  lilies  grow, 

he  brings  into  his  songs  none  of  the  dye  and  fragrance  of 
flowers. 

Perhaps  it  was  because  he  suspected  a  certain  levity  and 
thinness  in  his  genius  that  Campion  was  so  contemptuous 
of  his  English  verse.  His  songs  he  dismissed  as  "  super- 
fluous blossoms  of  his  deeper  studies."  It  is  as  though  he 


26  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

thought,  like  Bacon,  that  anything  written  for  immortality 
should  be  written  in  Latin.  Bacon,  it  may  be  remembered, 
translated  his  essays  into  Latin  for  fear  they  might  perish 
in  so  modern  and  barbarous  a  tongue  as  English.  Campion 
was  equally  inclined  to  despise  his  own  language  in  com- 
parison with  that  of  the  Greeks  and  Romans.  His  main 
quarrel  with  it  arose,  however,  from  the  obstinacy  with 
which  English  poets  clung  to  "the  childish  titillation  of 
rhyming."  "  Bring  before  me  now,"  he  wrote,  "  any  the 
most  self-loved  rhymer,  and  let  me  see  if  without  blushing 
he  be  able  to  read  his  lame,  halting  rhymes."  There  are 
few  more  startling  paradoxes  in  literature  than  that  it 
should  have  been  this  hater  of  rhymes  who  did  more  than 
any  other  writer  to  bring  the  art  of  rhyme  to  perfection  in 
the  English  language.  The  bent  of  his  intellect  was  classical, 
as  we  see  in  his  astonishing  Observations  on  the  Art  of  Eng- 
lish Poesy,  in  which  he  sets  out  to  demonstrate  "  the  unapt- 
ness  of  rhyme  in  poesy."  The  bent  of  his  genius,  on  the 
other  hand,  was  romantic,  as  was  shown  when,  desiring  to 
provide  certain  airs  with  words,  he  turned  out — that  seems, 
in  the  circumstances,  to  be  the  proper  word — "  after  the 
fashion  of  the  time,  ear-pleasing  rhymes  without  art."  His 
songs  can  hardly  be  called  "  pot-boilers,"  but  they  were 
equally  the  children  of  chance.  They  were  accidents,  not 
fulfilments  of  desire.  Luckily,  Campion,  writing  them  with 
music  in  his  head,  made  his  words  themselves  creatures  of 
music.  "  In  these  English  airs,"  he  wrote  in  one  of  his 
prefaces,  "  I  have  chiefly  aimed  to  couple  my  words  and 
notes  lovingly  together."  It  would  be  impossible  to  improve 
on  this  as  a  description  of  his  achievement  in  rhyme.  Only 
one  of  his  good  poems,  "  Rosecheek'd  Laura,"  is  to  be  found 
among  those  which  he  wrote  according  to  his  pseudo- 
classical  theory.  All  the  rest  are  among  those  in  which  he 
coupled  his  words  and  notes  lovingly  together,  not  as  a 
duty,  but  as  a  diversion. 

Irish  critics  have  sometimes  hoped  that  certain  qualities 
in  Campion's  music  might  be  traced  to  the  fact  that  his 
grandfather  was  "  John  Campion  of  Dublin,  Ireland."  The 


THOMAS  CAMPION  27 

art — and  in  Campion  it  was  art,  not  artlessness — with 
which  he  made  use  of  such  rhymes  as  "  hill  "  and  "  vigil," 
"sing"  and  "darling,"  besides  his  occasional  use  of  in- 
ternal rhyme  and  assonance  (he  rhymed  "  licens'd "  and 
"silence,"  "strangeness"  and  "plainness,"  for  example), 
has  seemed  to  be  more  akin  to  the  practices  of  Irish  than  of 
English  poets.  No  evidence  exists,  however,  as  to  whether 
Campion's  grandfather  was  Irish  in  anything  except  his 
adventures.  Of  Campion  himself  we  know  that  his  training 
was  English.  He  went  to  Peterhouse,  and,  though  he  left 
it  without  taking  a  degree,  he  was  apparently  regarded  as 
one  of  the  promising  figures  in  the  Cambridge  of  his  day. 
"  I  know,  Cambridge,"  apostrophized  a  writer  of  the  time, 
"  howsoever  now  old,  thou  hast  some  young.  Bid  them  be 
chaste,  yet  suffer  them  to  be  witty.  Let  them  be  soundly 
learned,  yet  suffer  them  to  be  gentlemanlike  qualified";  and 
the  admonitory  reference,  though  he  had  left  Cambridge 
some  time  before,  is  said  to  have  been  to  "  sweet  master 
Campion." 

The  rest  of  his  career  may  be  summarized  in  a  few 
sentences.  He  was  admitted  to  Gray's  Inn,  but  was  never 
called  to  the  Bar.  That  he  served  as  a  soldier  in  France 
under  Essex  is  inferred  by  his  biographers.  He  afterwards 
practised  as  a  doctor,  but  whether  he  studied  medicine 
during  his  travels  abroad  or  in  England  is  not  known.  The 
most  startling  fact  recorded  of  his  maturity  is  that  he  acted 
as  a  go-between  in  bribing  the  Lieutenant  of  the  Tower  to 
resign  his  post  and  make  way  for  a  more  pliable  successor 
on  the  eve  of  the  murder  of  Sir  Thomas  Overbury.  This  he 
did  on  behalf  of  Sir  Thomas  Monson,  one  of  whose  de- 
pendants, as  Mr.  Percival  Vivian  says,  "  actually  carried  the 
poisoned  tarts  and  jellies."  Campion  afterwards  wrote  a 
masque  in  celebration  of  the  nuptials  of  the  murderers. 
Both  Monson  and  he,  however,  are  universally  believed  to 
have  been  innocent  agents  in  the  crime.  Campion  boldly 
dedicated  his  Third  Book  of  Airs  to  Monson  after  the  first 
shadow  of  suspicion  had  passed. 

As  a  poet,   though   he  was   no   Puritan,   he  gives  the 


28  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

impression  of  having  been  a  man  of  general  virtue.  It  is 
not  only  that  he  added  piety  to  amorousness.  This  might 
be  regarded  as  flirting  with  religion.  Did  not  he  himself 
write,  in  explaining  why  he  mixed  pious  and  light  songs; 
"  He  that  in  publishing  any  work  hath  a  desire  to  content 
all  palates  must  cater  for  them  accordingly  "  ?  Even  if  the 
spiritual  depth  of  his  graver  songs  has  been  exaggerated, 
however,  they  are  clearly  the  expression  of  a  charming  and 
tender  spirit. 

Never  weather-beaten  sail  more  willing  bent  to  shore, 

Never  tired  pilgrim's  limbs  affected  slumber  more, 

Than  my  wearied  sprite  now  longs  to  fly  out  of  my  troubled  breast. 

O  come  quickly,  sweetest  Lord,  and  take  my  soul  to  rest. 

What  has  the  "  sweet  master  Campion  "  who  wrote  these 
lines  to  do  with  poisoned  tarts  and  jellies?  They  are  not 
ecstatic  enough  to  have  been  written  by  a  murderer. 


IV.— JOHN  DONNE 

IZAAK  WALTON  in  his  short  life  of  Donne  has  painted  a 
figure  of  almost  seraphic  beauty.  When  Donne  was  but  a 
boy,  he  declares,  it  was  said  that  the  age  had  brought  forth 
another  Pico  della  Mirandola.  As  a  young  man  in  his 
twenties,  he  was  a  prince  among  lovers,  who  by  his  secret 
marriage  with  his  patron's  niece — "  for  love,"  says  Walton, 
"  is  a  flattering  mischief  " — purchased  at  first  only  the  ruin 
of  his  hopes  and  a  term  in  prison.  Finally,  we  have  the 
later  Donne  in  the  pulpit  of  St.  Paul's  represented,  in  a 
beautiful  adaptation  of  one  of  his  own  images,  as  "always 
preaching  to  himself,  like  an  angel  from  a  cloud,  though  in 
none;  carrying  some,  as  St.  Paul  was,  to  Heaven  in  holy 
raptures,  and  enticing  others  by  a  sacred  art  and  courtship 
to  amend  their  lives."  The  picture  is  all  of  noble  charm. 
Walton  speaks  in  one  place  of  "  his  winning  behaviour — 
which,  when  it  would  entice,  had  a  strange  kind  of  elegant 
irresistible  art."  There  are  no  harsh  phrases  even  in  the 
references  to  those  irregularities  of  Donne's  youth,  by  which 
he  had  wasted  the  fortune  of  £3,000 — equal,  I  believe,  to 
more  than  £30,000  of  our  money — bequeathed  to  him  by 
his  father,  the  ironmonger.  "  Mr.  Donne's  estate,"  writes 
Walton  gently,  referring  to  his  penury  at  the  time  of  his 
marriage,  "  was  the  greatest  part  spent  in  many  and  charge- 
able travels,  books,  and  dear-bought  experience."  It  is  true 
that  he  quotes  Donne's  own  confession  of  the  irregularities 
of  his  early  life.  But  he  counts  them  of  no  significance. 
He  also  utters  a  sober  reproof  of  Donne's  secret  marriage 
as  "  the  remarkable  error  of  his  life."  But  how  little  he 
condemned  it  in  his  heart  is  clear  when  he  goes  on  to  tell  us 
that  God  blessed  Donne  and  his  wife  "with  so  mutual  and 
cordial  affections,  as  in  the  midst  of  their  sufferings  made 
their  bread  of  sorrow  taste  more  pleasantly  than  the  ban- 

20 


30  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

quets  of  dull  and  low-spirited  people."     It  was  not  for 
Walton  to  go  in  search  of  small  blemishes  in  him  whom 
he  regarded  as  the  wonder  of  the  world — him  whose  grave, 
mournful  friends  "  strewed   .    .    .   with  an  abundance  of 
curious  and  costly  flowers,"  as  Alexander  the  Great  strewed 
the  grave  of  "the  famous  Achilles."     In  that  grave  there 
was  buried  for  Walton  a  whole  age  magnificent  with  wit, 
passion,  adventure,  piety  and  beauty.     More  than  that,  the 
burial  of  Donne  was  for  him  the  burial  of  an  inimitable 
Christian.    He  mourns  over  "  that  body,  which  once  was  a 
Temple  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  and  is  now  become  a  small 
quantity  of  Christian  dust,"  and,  as  he  mourns,  he  breaks 
off  with  the  fervent  prophecy,  "  But  I  shall  see  it  reani- 
mated."    That  is  his  valediction.     If  Donne  is  esteemed 
three  hundred  years  after  his  death  less  as  a  great  Christian 
than  as  a  great  pagan,  this  is  because  we  now  look  for  him 
in  his  writings  rather  than  in  his  biography,  in  his  poetry 
rather  than  in  his  prose,  and  in  his  Songs  and  Sonnets  and 
Elegies  rather  than  in  his  Divine  Poems.    We  find,  in  some 
of  these,  abundant  evidence  of  the  existence  of  a  dark  angel 
at  odds  with  the  good  angel  of  Walton's  raptures.     Donne 
suffered  in  his  youth  all  the  temptations  of  Faust,     flis 
thirst  was  not  for  salvation  but  for  experience — experience 
of  the  intellect  and  experience  of  sensation.     He  has  left  it 
on  record  in  one  of  his  letters  that  he  was  a  victim  at  one 
period  of  "  the  worst  voluptuousness,  an  hydroptic,  immod- 
erate desire  of  human  learning  and  languages."    Faust  in  his 
cell  can  hardly  have  been  a  more  insatiate  student  than 
Donne.    "  In  the  most  unsettled  days  of  his  youth,"  Walton 
tells  us,  "  his  bed  was  not  able  to  detain  him  beyond  the  hour 
of  four  in  the  morning;  and  it  was  no  common  business  that 
drew  him  out  of  his  chamber  till  past  ten;  all  which  time 
was  employed  in  study;  though  he  took  great  liberty  after 
it."     His  thoroughness  of  study  may  be  judged  from  the 
fact  that  "he  left  the  resultance  of  1,400  authors,  most  of 
them  abridged  and  analyzed  with  his  own  hand."     But  we 
need  not  go  beyond  his  poems  for  proof  of  the  wilderness 
of  learning  that  he  had  made  his  own.     He  was  versed  in 


JOHN  DONNE  31 


medicine  and  the  law  as  well  as  in  theology.  He  subdued 
astronomy,  physiology,  and  geography  to  the  needs  of 
poetry.  Nine  Muses  were  not  enough  for  him,  even  though 
they  included  Urania.  He  called  in  to  their  aid  Galen  and 
Copernicus.  He  did  not  go  to  the  hills  and  the  springs  for 
his  images,  but  to  the  laboratory  and  the  library,  and  in  the 
library  the  books  that  he  consulted  to  the  greatest  effect  were 
the  works  of  men  of  science  and  learning,  not  of  the  great 
poets  with  whom  London  may  almost  be  said  to  have  been 
peopled  during  his  lifetime.  I  do  not  think  his  verse  or 
correspondence  contains  a  single  reference  to  Shakespeare, 
whose  contemporary  he  was,  being  born  only  nine  years 
later.  The  only  great  Elizabethan  poet  whom  he  seems  to 
have  regarded  with  interest  and  even  friendship  was  Ben 
Jonson.  Jonson's  Catholicism  may  have  been  a  link  be- 
tween them.  But,  more  important  than  that,  Jonson  was, 
like  Donne  himself,  an  inflamed  pedant.  For  each  of  them 
learning  was  the  necessary  robe  of  genius.  Jonson,  it  is 
true,  was  a  pedant  of  the  classics,  Donne  of  the  speculative 
sciences;  but  both  of  them  alike  ate  to  a  surfeit  of  the  fruit 
of  the  tree  of  knowledge.  It  was,  I  think,  because  Donne 
was  to  so  great  a  degree  a  pagan  of  the  Renaissance,  loving 
the  proud  things  of  the  intellect  more  than  the  treasures  of 
the  humble,  that  he  found  it  easy  to  abandon  the  Catholicism 
of  his  family  for  Protestantism.  He  undoubtedly  became 
in  later  life  a  convinced  and  passionate  Christian  of  the 
Protestant  faith,  but  at  the  time  when  he  first  changed  his 
religion  he  had  none  of  the  fanaticism  of  the  pious  convert. 
He  wrote  in  an  early  satire  as  a  man  whom  the  intellect  had 
liberated  from  dogma-worship.  Nor  did  he  ever  lose  this 
rationalist  tolerance.  "  You  know,"  he  once  wrote  to  a 
friend,  "  I  have  never  imprisoned  the  word  religion.  .  .  . 
They  "  (the  churches)  "  are  all  virtual  beams  of  one  sun." 
Few  converts  in  those  days  of  the  wars  of  religion  wrote 
with  such  wise  reason  of  the  creeds  as  did  Donne  in  the 

To  adore  or  scorn  an  image,  or  protest, 
May  all  be  bad ;  doubt  wisely ;  in  strange  way 
To  stand  inquiring  right,  is  not  to  stray; 


32  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

To  sleep  or  run  wrong  is.    On  a  huge  hill, 
Cragged  and  steep,  Truth  stands,  and  he  that  will 
Reach  her,  about  must  and  about  must  go; 
And  what  the  hill's  suddenness  resists  win  so. 

This  surely  was  the  heresy  of  an  inquisitive  mind,  not  the 
mood  of  a  theologian.  It  betrays  a  tolerance  springing 
from  ardent  doubt,  not  from  ardent  faith. 

It  is  all  in  keeping  with  one's  impression  of  the  young 
Donne  as  a  man  setting  out  bravely  in  his  cockle-shell  on 
the  oceans  of  knowledge  and  experience.  He  travels, 
though  he  knows  not  why  he  travels.  He  loves,  though  he 
knows  not  why  he  loves.  He  must  escape  from  that 
"  hydroptic,  immoderate  "  thirst  of  experience  by  yielding  to 
it.  One  fancies  that  it  was  in  this  spirit  that  he  joined  the 
expedition  of  Essex  to  Cadiz  in  1596  and  afterwards  sailed 
to  the  Azores.  Or  partly  in  this  spirit,  for  he  himself  leads 
one  to  think  that  his  love-affairs  may  have  had  something 
to  do  with  it.  In  the  second  of  those  prematurely  realistic 
descriptions  of  storm  and  calm  relating  to  the  Azores  voy- 
age, he  writes : 

Whether  a  rotten  state,  and  hope  of  gain, 
Or  to  disuse  me  from  the  queasy  pain 
Of  being  belov'd,  and  loving,  or  the  thirst 
Of  honour,  or  fair  death,  out  pusht  me  first. 

In  these  lines  we  get  a  glimpse  of  the  Donne  that  has 
attracted  most  interest  in  recent  years — the  Donne  who 
experienced  more  variously  than  any  other  poet  of  his  time 
"  the  queasy  pain  of  being  beloved  and  loving."  Donne 
was  curious  of  adventures  of  many  kinds,  but  in  nothing 
more  than  in  love.  As  a  youth  he  leaves  the  impression  of 
having  been  an  Odysseus  of  love,  a  man  of  many  wiles  and 
many  travels.  He  was  a  virile  neurotic,  comparable  in  some 
points  to  Baudelaire,  who  was  a  sensualist  of  the  mind  even 
more  than  of  the  body.  His  sensibilities  were  different  as 
well  as  less  of  a  piece,  but  he  had  something  of  Baudelaire's 
taste  for  hideous  and  shocking  aspects  of  lust.  One  is  not 
surprised  to  find  among  his  poems  that  "  heroical  epistle  of 
Sappho  to  Philaenis,"  in  which  he  makes  himself  the  casuist 


JOHN  DONNE  33 


of  forbidden  things.  His  studies  of  sensuality,  however, 
are  for  the  most  part  normal,  even  in  their  grossness.  There 
was  in  him  more  of  the  Yahoo  than  of  the  decadent.  There 
was  an  excremental  element  in  his  genius  as  in  the  genius  of 
that  other  gloomy  dean,  Jonathan  Swift.  Donne  and  Swift 
were  alike  satirists  born  under  Saturn.  They  laughed  more 
frequently  from  disillusion  than  from  happiness.  Donne,  it 
must  be  admitted,  turned  his  disillusion  to  charming  as  well 
as  hideous  uses.  Go  and  Catch  a  Falling  Star  is  but  one 
of  a  series  of  delightful  lyrics  in  disparagement  of  women. 
In  several  of  the  Elegies,  however,  he  throws  away  his 
lute  and  comes  to  the  satirist's  more  prosaic  business.  He 
writes  frankly  as  a  man  in  search  of  bodily  experiences : 

Whoever  loves,  if  he  do  not  propose 

The  right  true  end  of  love,  he's  one  that  goes 

To  sea  for  nothing  but  to  make  him  sick. 

In  Love  Progress  he  lets  his  fancy  dwell  on  the  detailed 
geography  of  a  woman's  body,  with  the  sick  imagination  of 
a  schoolboy,  till  the  beautiful  seems  almost  beastly.  In  The 
Anagram  and  The  Comparison  he  plays  the  Yahoo  at  the 
expense  of  all  women  by  the  similes  he  uses  in  insulting  two 
of  them.  In  The  Perfume  he  relates  the  story  of  an  intrigue 
with  a  girl  whose  father  discovered  his  presence  in  the  house 
as  a  result  of  his  using  scent.  Donne's  jest  about  it  i§ 
suggestive  of  his  uncontrollable  passion  for  ugliness : 

Had  it  been  some  bad  smell,  he  would  have  thought 
That  his  own  feet,  or  breath,  that  smell  had  brought. 

It  may  be  contended  that  in  The  Perfume  he  was  describing 
an  imaginary  experience,  and  indeed  we  have  his  own  words 
on  record :  "  I  did  best  when  I  had  least  truth  for  my  sub- 
jects." But  even  if  we  did  not  accept  Mr.  Gosse's  common- 
sense  explanation  of  these  words,  we  should  feel  that  the 
details  of  the  story  have  a  vividness  that  springs  straight 
from  reality.  It  is  difficult  to  believe  that  Donne  had  not 
actually  lived  in  terror  of  the  gigantic  manservant  who  was 
set  to  spy  on  the  lovers : 


34  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

The  grim  eight-foot-high  iron-bound  serving-man 
That  oft  names  God  in  oaths,  and  only  then; 
He  that  to  bar  the  first  gate  doth  as  wide 
As  the  great  Rhodian  Colossus  stride, 
Which,  if  in  hell  no  other  pains  there  were, 
Makes  me  fear  hell,  because  he  must  be  there. 

But  the  most  interesting  of  all  the  sensual  intrigues  of 
Donne,  from  the  point  of  view  of  biography,  especially  since 
Mr.  Gosse  gave  it  such  commanding  significance  in  that 
Life  of  John  Donne  in  which  he  made  a  living  man  out  of  a 
mummy,  is  that  of  which  we  have  the  story  in  Jealousy  and 
His  Parting  from  Her.  It  is  another  story  of  furtive  and 
forbidden  love.  Its  theme  is  an  intrigue  carried  on  under  a 

Husband's  towering  eyes, 
That  flamed  with  oily  sweat  of  jealousy. 

A  characteristic  touch  of  grimness  is  added  to  the  story  by 
making  the  husband  a  deformed  man.  Donne,  however, 
merely  laughs  at  his  deformity,  as  he  bids  the  lady  laugh  at 
the  jealousy  that  reduces  her  to  tears : 

O  give  him  many  thanks,  he  is  courteous, 

That  in  suspecting  kindly  warneth  us. 

We  must  not,  as  we  used,  flout  openly, 

In  scoffing  riddles,  his  deformity; 

Nor  at  his  board  together  being  set, 

With  words  nor  touch  scarce  looks  adulterate. 

And  he  proposes  that,  now  that  the  husband  seems  to  have 
discovered  them,  they  shall  henceforth  carry  on  their  in- 
trigue at  some  distance  from  where 

He,  swol'n  and  pampered  with  great  fare, 
Sits  down  and  snorts,  cag'd  in  his  basket  chair. 

It  is  an  extraordinary  story,  if  it  is  true.  It  throws  a 
scarcely  less  extraordinary  light  on  the  nature  of  Donne's 
mind,  if  he  invented  it.  At  the  same  time,  I  do  not  think  the 
events  it  relates  played  the  important  part  which  Mr.  Gosse 
assigns  to  them  in  Donne's  spiritual  biography.  It  is  impos- 
sible to  read  Mr.  Gosse's  two  volumes  without  getting  the 


JOHN  DONNE  35 


impression  that  "  the  deplorable  but  eventful  liaison,"  as  he 
calls  it,  was  the  most  fruitful  occurrence  in  Donne's  life  as  a 
poet.  He  discovers  traces  of  it  in  one  great  poem  after 
another — even  in  the  Nocturnal  upon  St.  Lucy's  Day,  which 
is  commonly  supposed  to  relate  to  the  Countess  of  Bedford, 
and  in  The  Funeral,  the  theme  of  which  Professor  Grierson 
takes  to  be  the  mother  of  George  Herbert.  I  confess  that 
the  oftener  I  read  the  poetry  of  Donne  the  more  firmly  I 
become  convinced  that,  far  from  being  primarily  the  poet 
of  desire  gratified  and  satiated,  he  is  essentially  the  poet  of 
frustrated  love.  He  is  often  described  by  the  historians  of 
literature  as  the  poet  who  finally  broke  down  the  tradition 
of  Platonic  love.  I  believe  that,  so  far  is  this  from  being  the 
case,  he  is  the  supreme  example  of  a  Platonic  lover  among 
the  English  poets.  He  was  usually  Platonic  under  protest, 
but  at  other  times  exultantly  so.  Whether  he  finally  over- 
came the  more  consistent  Platonism  of  his  mistress  by  the 
impassioned  logic  of  The  Ecstasy  we  have  no  means  of 
knowing.  If  he  did,  it  would  be  difficult  to  resist  the  con- 
clusion that  the  lady  who  wished  to  continue  to  be  his 
passionate  friend  and  to  ignore  the  physical  side  of  love  was 
Anne  More,  whom  he  afterwards  married.  If  not,  we  may 
look  for  her  where  we  will,  whether  in  Magdalen  Herbert 
(already  a  young  widow  who  had  borne  ten  children  when 
he  first  met  her)  or  in  the  Countess  of  Bedford  or  in  an- 
other. The  name  is  not  important,  and  one  is  not  concerned 
to  know  it,  especially  when  one  remembers  Donne's  alarm- 
ing curse  on: 

Whoever  guesses,  thinks,  or  dreams  he  knows 
Who  is  my  mistress. 

One  sort  of  readers  will  go  on  speculating,  hoping  to  dis- 
cover real  people  in  the  shadows,  as  they  speculate  about 
Swift's  Stella  and  Vanessa,  and  his  relations  to  them.  It 
is  enough  for  us  to  feel,  however,  that  these  poems  railing  at 
or  glorying  in  Platonic  love  are  no  mere  goldsmith's  com- 
pliments, like  the  rhymed  letters  to  Mrs.  Herbert  and  Lady 
Bedford.  Miracles  of  this  sort  are  not  wrought  save  by  the 


36  THE  AET  OF  LETTERS 

heart.  We  do  not  find  in  them  the  underground  and  sar- 
donic element  that  appears  in  so  much  of  Donne's  merely 
amorous  work.  We  no  longer  picture  him  as  a  sort  of 
Vulcan  hammering  out  the  poetry  of  base  love,  raucous, 
powerful,  mocking.  He  becomes  in  them  a  child  A'pollo, 
as  far  as  his  temperament  will  allow  him.  He  makes  music 
of  so  grave  and  stately  a  beauty  that  one  begins  to  wonder  at 
all  the  critics  who  have  found  fault  with  his  rhythms — from 
Ben  Jonson,  who  said  that  "  for  not  keeping  accent,  Donne 
deserved  hanging1,"  down  to  Coleridge,  who  declared  that 
his  "  muse  on  dromedary  trots,"  and  described  him  as 
"rhyme's  sturdy  cripple."  Coleridge's  quatrain  on  Donne 
is,  without  doubt,  an  unequalled  masterpiece  of  epigram- 
matic criticism.  But  Donne  rode  no  dromedary.  In  his 
greatest  poems  he  rides  Pegasus  like  a  master,  even  if  he 
does  rather  weigh  the  poor  beast  down  by  carrying  an 
encyclopaedia  in  his  saddle-bags. 

Not  only  does  Donne  remain  a  learned  man  on  his 
Pegasus,  however:  he  also  remains  a  humorist,  a  serious 
fantastic.  Humour  and  passion  pursue  each  other  through 
the  labyrinth  of  his  being,  as  we  find  in  those  two  beautiful 
poems,  The  Relic  and  The  Funeral,  addressed  to  the  lady 
who  had  given  him  a  bracelet  of  her  hair.  In  the  former  he 
foretells  what  will  happen  if  ever  his  grave  is  broken  up  and 
his  skeleton  discovered  with 

A  bracelet  of  bright  hair  about  the  bone. 


People  will  fancy,  he  declares,  that  the  bracelet  is  a  device 
of  lovers 

To  make  their  souls  at  the  last  busy  day 
Meet  at  the  grave  and  make  a  little  stay. 

Bone  and  bracelet  will  be  worshipped  as  relics — the  relics 
of  a  Magdalen  and  her  lover.  He  conjectures  with  a  quiet 
smile: 

All  women  shall  adore  us,  and  some  men. 

He  warns  his  worshippers,  however,  that  the  facts  are  far 
different  from  what  they  imagine,  and  tells  the  miracle- 


JOHN  DONNE  37 


seekers  what  in  reality  were  "  the  miracles  we  harmless 
lovers  wrought " : 

First  we  loved  well  and  faithfully, 
Yet  knew  not  what  we  lov'd,  nor  why; 
Difference  of  sex  no  more  we  knew 
Than  our  guardian  angels  do; 

Coming  and  going,  we 
Perchance  might  kiss,  but  not  between  those  meals ; 

Our  hands  ne'er  touch'd  the  seals, 
Which  nature,  injur'd  by  late  law,  sets  free: 
These  miracles  we  did ;  but  now,  alas ! 
All  measure,  and  all  language  I  should  pass, 
Should  I  tell  what  a  miracle  she  was. 

In  The  Funeral  he  returns  to  the  same  theme : 

Whoever  comes  to  shroud  me  do  not  harm 

Nor  question  much 

That  subtle  wreath  of  hair  that  crowns  my  arm ; 
The  mystery,  the  sign  you  must  not  touch, 

For  'tis  my  outward  soul. 

In  this  poem,  however,  he  finds  less  consolation  than  before 
in  the  too  miraculous  nobleness  of  their  love: 

Whate'er  she  meant  by  it,  bury  it  with  me, 

For  since  I  am 

Love's  martyr,  it  might  breed  idolatry, 
If  into  other  hands  these  relics  came; 

As  'twas  humility 
To  afford  to  it  all  that  a  soul  can  do, 

So,  'tis  some  bravery, 

That,  since  you  would  have  none  of  me,  I  bury  seme 
of  you. 

In  The  Blossom  he  is  in  a  still  more  earthly  mood,  and 
declares  that,  if  his  mistress  remains  obdurate,  he  will  return 
to  London,  where  he  will  find  a  mistress : 

As  glad  to  have  my  body  as  my  mind. 

The  Primrose  is  another  appeal  for  a  less  intellectual  love : 

Should  she 

Be  more  than  woman,  she  would  get  above 
All  thought  of  sex,  and  think  to  move 
My  heart  to  study  her,  and  not  to  love. 


38  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

If  we  turn  back  to  The  Undertaking,  however,  we  find 
Donne  boasting  once  more  of  the  miraculous  purity  of  a 
love  which  it  would  be  useless  to  communicate  to  other  men, 
since,  there  being  no  other  mistress  to  love  in  the  same  kind, 
they  "  would  love  but  as  before."  Hence  he  will  keep  the 
tale  a  secret : 

If,  as  I  have,  you  also  do, 
Virtue  attir'd  in  woman  see, 

And  dare  love  that,  and  say  so  too, 
And  forget  the  He  and  She. 

And  if  this  love,  though  placed  so, 

From  profane  men  you  hide, 
Which  will  no  faith  on  this  bestow, 

Or,  if  they  do,  deride : 

Then  you  have  done  a  braver  thing 

Than  all  the  Worthies  did; 
And  a  braver  thence  will  spring, 

Which  is,  to  keep  that  hid. 

It  seems  to  me,  in  view  of  this  remarkable  series  of  poems, 
that  it  is  useless  to  look  in  Donne  for  a  single  consistent 
attitude  to  love.  His  poems  take  us  round  the  entire  com- 
pass of  love  as  the  work  of  no  -other  English  poet — not 
even,  perhaps,  Browning's — does.  He  was  by  destiny  the 
complete  experimentalist  in  love  in  English  literature.  He 
passed  through  phase  after  phase  of  the  love  of  the  body 
only,  phase  after  phase  of  the  love  of  the  soul  only,  and 
ended  as  the  poet  of  the  perfect  marriage.  In  his  youth  he 
was  a  gay — but  was  he  ever  really  gay? — free-lover,  who 
sang  jestingly : 

How  happy  were  our  sires  in  ancient  time, 
Who  held  plurality  of  loves  no  crime ! 

But  even  then  he  looks  forward,  not  with  cynicism,  to 
a  time  when  he 

Shall  not  so  easily  be  to  change  dispos'd, 
Nor  to  the  arts  of  several  eyes  obeying; 
But  beauty  with  true  worth  securely  weighing, 
Which,  being  found  assembled  in  some  one, 
We'll  love  her  ever,  and  love  her  alone. 


JOHN  DONNE  39 


By  the  time  he  writes  The  Ecstasy  the  victim  of  the  body 
has  become  the  protesting  victim  of  the  soul.  He  cries  out 
against  a  love  that  is  merely  an  ecstatic  friendship: 

But  O  alas,  so  long,  so  far, 
Our  bodies  why  do  we  forbear? 

He  pleads  for  the  recognition  of  the  body,  contending  that 
it  is  not  the  enemy  but  the  companion  of  the  soul : 

Soul  into  the  soul  may  flow 

Though  it  to  body  first  repair. 

The  realistic  philosophy  of  love  has  never  been  set  forth 
with  greater  intellectual  vehemence: 

So  must  pure  lovers'  souls  descend 

T*  affections  and  to  faculties, 
Which  sense  may  reach  and  apprehend, 

Else  a  great  Prince  in  prison  lies. 
To  our  bodies  turn  we  then,  that  so 

Weak  men  on  love  reveal'd  may  look; 
Love's  mysteries  in  souls  do  grow 

But  yet  the  body  is  the  book. 

I,  for  one,  find  it  impossible  to  believe  that  all  this  pas- 
sionate verse — verse  in  which  we  find  the  quintessence  of 
Donne's  genius — was  a  mere  utterance  of  abstract  thoughts 
into  the  wind.  Donne,  as  has  been  pointed  out,  was  more 
than  most  writers  a  poet  of  personal  experience.  His  great- 
est poetry  was  born  of  struggle  and  conflict  in  the  obscure 
depths  of  the  soul  as  surely  as  was  the  religion  of  St.  Paul. 
I  doubt  if,  in  the  history  of  his  genius,  any  event  ever 
happened  of  equal  importance  to  his  meeting  with  the  lady 
who  first  set  going  in  his  brain  that  fevered  dialogue  between 
the  body  and  the  soul.  Had  he  been  less  of  a  frustrated 
lover,  less  of  a  martyr,  in  whom  love's 

Art  did  express 

A  quintessence  even  from  nothingness, 
From  dull  privations  and  lean  emptiness, 

much  of  his  greatest  poetry,  it  seems  to  me,  would  never 
have  been  written. 

One  cannot,  unfortunately,  write  the  history  of  the  prog- 
ress of  Donne's  genius  save  by  inference  and   guessing. 


40  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

His  poems  were  not,  with  some  unimportant  exceptions, 
published  in  his  lifetime.  He  did  not  arrange  them  in 
chronological  or  in  any  sort  of  order.  His  poem  on  the  flea 
that  has  bitten  both  him  and  his  inamorata  comes  after  the 
triumphant  Anniversary,  and  but  a  page  or  two  before  the 
Nocturnal  upon  St.  Lucy's  Day.  Hence  there  is  no  means 
of  telling  how  far  we  are  indebted  to  the  Platonism  of  one 
woman,  how  much  to  his  marriage  with  another,  for  the 
enrichment  of  his  genius.  Such  a  poem  as  The  Canonisa- 
tion can  be  interpreted  either  in  a  Platonic  sense  or  as  a 
poem  written  to  Anne  More,  who  was  to  bring  him  both 
imprisonment  and  the  liberty  of  love.  It  is,  in  either  case, 
written  in  defence  of  his  love  against  some  who  censured 
him  for  it: 

For  God's  sake,  hold  your  tongue,  and  let  me  love. 

In  the  last  verses  of  the  poem  Donne  proclaims  that  his  love 
cannot  be  measured  by  the  standards  of  the  vulgar : 

We  can  die  by  it,  if  not  live  by  love, 

And  if  unfit  for  tombs  or  hearse 
Our  legend  be,  it  will  be  fit  for  verse ; 
And,  if  no  piece  of  chronicle  we  prove, 
We'll  build  in  sonnets  pretty  rooms ; 
As  well  a  well-wrought  urn  becomes 
The  greatest  ashes  as  half-acre  tombs, 

And  by  these  hymns  all  shall  approve 
Us  canoniz'd  by  love : 

And  thus  invoke  us :  "  You  whom  reverend  love 

Made  one  another's  hermitage; 
You  to  whom  love  was  peace,  that  now  is  rage; 
Who  did  the  whole  world's  soul  contract  and  drove 
Into  the  glasses  of  your  eyes 
(So  made  such  mirrors,  and  such  spies, 
That  they  did  all  to  you  epitomize), 

Countries,  towns,  courts.    Beg  from  above 
A  pattern  of  your  love !  " 

According  to  Walton,   it  was  to  his  wife  that  Donne 
addressed  the  beautiful  verses  beginning: 

Sweetest  love,  I  do  not  go 

For  weariness  of  thee ;  • . 


JOHN  DONNE  41 


as  well  as  the  series  of  Valedictions.  Of  many  of  the  other 
love-poems,  however,  we  can  measure  the  intensity  but  not 
guess  the  occasion.  All  that  we  can  say  with  confidence 
when  we  have  read  them  is  that,  after  we  have  followed 
one  tributary  on  another  leading  down  to  the  ultimate 
Thames  of  his  genius,  we  know  that  his  progress  as  a  lover 
was  a  progress  from  infidelity  to  fidelity,  from  wandering 
amorousness  to  deep  and  enduring  passion.  The  image  that 
is  finally  stamped  on  his  greatest  work  is  not  that  of  a 
roving  adulterer,  but  of  a  monotheist  of  love.  It  is  true 
that  there  is  enough  Don-Juanism  in  the  poems  to  have 
led  even  Sir  Thomas  Browne  to  think  of  Donne's  verse 
rather  as  a  confession  of  his  sins  than  as  a  golden  book  of 
love.  Browne's  quaint  poem,  To  the  deceased  Author, 
before  the  Promiscuous  printing  of  his  Poems,  the  Looser 
Sort,  with  the  Religious,  is  so  little  known  that  it  may  be 
quoted  in  full  as  the  expression  of  one  point  of  view  in 
regard  to  Donne's  work: 

When  thy  loose  raptures,  Donne,  shall  meet  with  those 
That  do  confine 
Tuning  unto  the  duller  line, 
And  sing  not  but  in  sanctified  prose, 
How  will  they,  with  sharper  eyes, 
The  foreskin  of  thy  fancy  circumcise, 
And  fear  thy  wantonness  should  now  begin 
Example,  that  hath  ceased  to  be  sin ! 

And  that  fear  fans  their  heat ;  whilst  knowing  eyes 
Will  not  admire 
At  this  strange  fire 

That  here  is  mingled  with  thy  sacrifice, 
But  dare  read  even  thy  wanton  story 
As  thy  confession,  not  thy  glory; 
And  will  so  envy  both  to  future  times, 
That  they  would  buy  thy  goodness  with  thy  crimes. 

To  the  modern  reader,  on  the  contrary,  it  will  seem  that 
there  is  as  much  divinity  in  the  best  of  the  love-poems  as 
in  the  best  of  the  religious  ones.  Donne's  last  word 
as  a  secular  poet  may  well  be  regarded  as  having  been 
uttered  in  that  great  poem  in  celebration  of  lasting 


42 


love,    The  Anniversary,  which  closes  with  so  majestic  a 
sweep : 

Here  upon  earth  we  are  kings,  and  none  but  we 
Can  be  such  kings,  nor  of  such  subjects  be. 
Who  is  so  safe  as  we,  where  none  can  do 
Treason  to  us,  except  one  of  us  two? 

True  and  false  fears  let  us  refrain ; 
Let  us  love  nobly,  and  live,  and  add  again 
Years  and  years  unto  years,  till  we  attain 
To  write  three-score :  this  is  the  second  of  our  reign. 

Donne's  conversion  as  a  lover  was  obviously  as  complete 
and  revolutionary  as  his  conversion  in  religion. 

It  is  said,  indeed,  to  have  led  to  his  conversion  to  pas- 
sionate religion.  When  his  marriage  with  Sir  George 
More's  sixteen-year-old  daughter  brought  him  at  first  only 
imprisonment  and  poverty,  he  summed  up  the  sorrows  of 
the  situation  in  the  famous  line — a  line  which  has  some 
additional  interest  as  suggesting  the  correct  pronunciation 
of  his  name : 

John  Donne ;  Anne  Donne ;  Undone. 

His  married  life,  however,  in  spite  of  a  succession  of  mis- 
eries due  to  ill-health,  debt  and  thwarted  ambition,  seems 
to  have  been  happy  beyond  prophecy ;  and  when  at  the  end 
of  sixteen  years  his  wife  died  in  childbed,  after  having 
borne  him  twelve  children,  a  religious  crisis  resulted  that 
turned  his  conventional  churchmanship  into  sanctity.  His 
original  change  from  Catholicism  to  Protestantism  has  been 
already  mentioned.  Most  of  the  authorities  are  agreed, 
however,  that  this  was  a  conversion  in  a  formal  rather  than 
in  a  spiritual  sense.  Even  when  he  took  Holy  Orders  in 
1615,  at  the  age  of  forty-two,  he  appears  to  have  done  so 
less  in  answer  to  any  impulse  to  a  religious  life  from  within 
than  because,  with  the  downfall  of  Somerset,  all  hope  of 
advancement  through  his  legal  attainments  was  brought  to 
an  end.  Undoubtedly,  as  far  back  as  1612,  he  had  thought 
of  entering  the  Church.  But  we  find  him  at  the  end  of 
1613  writing  an  epithalamium  for  the  murderers  of  Sir 
Thomas  Overbury.  It  is  a  curious  fact  that  three  great 


JOHN  DONNE  43 


poets — Donne,  Ben  Jonson,  and  Campion — appear,  though 
innocently  enough,  in  the  story  of  the  Countess  of  Essex's 
sordid  crime.  Donne's  temper  at  the  time  is  still  clearly 
that  of  a  man  of  the  world.  His  jest  at  the  expense  of  Sir 
Walter  Raleigh,  then  in  the  Tower,  is  the  jest  of  an  un- 
generous worldling.  Even  after  his  admission  into  the 
Church  he  reveals  himself  as  ungenerously  morose  when 
the  Countess  of  Bedford,  in  trouble  about  her  own  extrava- 
gances, can  afford  him  no  more  than  £30  to  pay  his  debts. 
The  truth  is,  to  be  forty  and  a  failure  is  an  affliction  that 
might  sour  even  a  healthy  nature.  The  effect  on  a  man  of 
Donne's  ambitious  and  melancholy  temperament,  together 
with  the  memory  of  his  dissipated  health  and  his  dissipated 
fortune,  and  the  spectacle  of  a  long  family  in  constant 
process  of  increase,  must  have  been  disastrous.  To  such  a 
man  poverty  and  neglected  merit  are  a  prison,  as  they  were 
to  Swift.  One  thinks  of  each  of  them  as  a  lion  in  a  cage, 
ever  growing  less  and  less  patient  of  his  bars.  Shakespeare 
and  Shelley  had  in  them  some  volatile  element  that  could, 
one  feels,  have  escaped  through  the  bars  and  sung  above 
the  ground.  Donne  and  Swift  were  morbid  men  suffering 
from  claustrophobia.  They  were  pent  and  imprisoned 
spirits,  hating  the  walls  that  seemed  to  threaten  to  close  in 
on  them  and  crush  them.  In  his  poems  and  letters  Donne  is 
haunted  especially  by  three  images — the  hospital,  the  prison, 
and  the  grave.  Disease,  I  think,  preyed  on  his  mind  even 
more  terrifyingly  than  warped  ambition.  "  Put  all  the 
miseries  that  man  is  subject  to  together,"  he  exclaims  in 
one  of  the  passages  in  that  luxuriant  anthology  that  Mr. 
Logan  Pearsall  Smith  has  made  from  the  Sermons;  "  sick- 
ness is  more  than  all.  ...  In  poverty  I  lack  but  other 
things ;  in  banishment  I  lack  but  other  men ;  but  in  sickness 
I  lack  myself."  Walton  declares  that  it  was  from  consump- 
tion that  Donne  suffered ;  but  he  had  probably  the  seeds  of 
many  diseases.  In  some  of  his  letters  he  dwells  miserably  on 
the  symptoms  of  his  illnesses.  At  one  time,  his  sickness 
"  hath  so  much  of  a  cramp  that  it  wrests  the  sinews,  so  much 
of  tetane  that  it  withdraws  and  pulls  the  mouth,  and  so  much 


44  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

of  the  gout  .  .  .  that  it  is  not  like  to  be  cured.  ...  I 
shall,"  he  adds,  "  be  in  this  world,  like  a  porter  in  a  great 
house,  but  seldomest  abroad;  I  shall  have  many  things  to 
make  me  weary,  and  yet  not  get  leave  to  be  gone."  Even 
after  his  conversion  he  felt  drawn  to  a  morbid  insistence  on 
the  details  of  his  ill-health.  Those  amazing  records  which  he 
wrote  while  lying  ill  in  bed  in  October,  1623,  give  us  a  real- 
istic study  of  a  sick-bed  and  its  circumstances,  the  gloom  of 
which  is  hardly  even  lightened  by  his  odd  account  of  the  dis- 
appearance of  his  sense  of  taste :  "  My  taste  is  not  gone 
away,  but  gone  up  to  sit  at  David's  table;  my  stomach  is 
not  gone,  but  gone  upwards  toward  the  Supper  of  the 
Lamb."  "  I  am  mine  own  ghost,"  he  cries,  "  and  rather 
affright  my  beholders  than  interest  them.  .  .  .  Miserable 
and  inhuman  fortune,  when  I  must  practise  my  lying  in  the 
grave  by  lying  still." 

It  does  not  surprise  one  to  learn  that  a  man  thus  assailed 
by  wretchedness  and  given  to  looking  in  the  mirror  of  his 
own  bodily  corruptions  was  often  tempted,  by  "  a  sickly 
inclination,"  to  commit  suicide,  and  that  he  even  wrote, 
though  he  did  not  dare  to  publish,  an  apology  for  suicide 
on  religious  grounds,  his  famous  and  little-read  Biathanatos. 
The  family  crest  of  the  Donnes  was  a  sheaf  of  snakes,  and 
these  symbolize  well  enough  the  brood  of  temptations  that 
twisted  about  in  this  unfortunate  Christian's  bosom.  Donne, 
in  the  days  of  his  salvation,  abandoned  the  family  crest  for 
a  new  one — Christ  crucified  on  an  anchor.  But  he  might 
well  have  left  the  snakes  writhing  about  the  anchor.  He 
remained  a  tempted  man  to  the  end.  One  wishes  that  the 
Sermons  threw  more  light  on  his  later  personal  life  than 
they  do.  But  perhaps  that  is  too  much  to  expect  of  ser- 
mons. There  is  no  form  of  literature  less  personal  except 
a  leading  article.  The  preacher  usually  regards  himself  as 
a  mouthpiece  rather  than  a  man  giving  expression  to  him- 
self. In  the  circumstances  what  surprises  us  is  that  the 
Sermons  reveal,  not  so  little,  but  so  much  of  Donne. 
Indeed,  they  make  us  feel  far  more  intimate  with  Donne 
than  do  his  private  letters,  many  of  which  are  little  more 


JOHN  DONNE  45 


than  exercises  in  composition.  As  a  preacher,  no  less  than 
as  a  poet,  he  is  inflamed  by  the  creative  heat.  He  shows  the 
same  vehemence  of  fancy  in  the  presence  of  the  divine  and 
infernal  universe — a  vehemence  that  prevents  even  his  most 
far-sought  extravagances  from  disgusting  us  as  do  the  luke- 
warm follies  of  the  Euphuists.  Undoubtedly  the  modern 
reader  smiles  when  Donne,  explaining  that  man  can  be  an 
enemy  of  God  as  the  mouse  can  be  an  enemy  to  the  elephant, 
goes  on  to  speak  of  "  God  who  is  not  only  a  multiplied 
elephant,  millions  of  elephants  multiplied  into  one,  but  a 
multiplied  world,  a  multiplied  all,  all  that  can  be  conceived 
by  us,  infinite  many  times  over;  nay  (if  we  may  dare  to  say 
so)  a  multiplied  God,  a  God  that  hath  the  millions  of  the 
heathens'  gods  in  Himself  alone."  But  at  the  same  time 
one  finds  oneself  taking  a  serious  pleasure  in  the  huge  sorites 
of  quips  and  fancies  in  which  he  loves  to  present  the  divine 
argument.  Nine  out  of  ten  readers  of  the  Sermons,  I  im- 
agine, will  be  first  attracted  to  them  through  love  of  the 
poems.  They  need  not  be  surprised  if  they  do  not  immedi- 
ately enjoy  them.  The  dust  of  the  pulpit  lies  on  them  thickly 
enough.  As  one  goes  on  reading  them,  however,  one  be- 
comes suddenly  aware  of  their  florid  and  exiled  beauty.  One 
sees  beyond  their  local  theology  to  the  passion  of  a  great 
suffering  artist.  Here  are  sentences  that  express  the  Para- 
dise, the  Purgatory,  and  the  Hell  of  John  Donne's  soul.  A 
noble  imagination  is  at  work — a  grave-digging  imagination, 
but  also  an  imagination  that  is  at  home  among  the  stars. 
One  can  open  Mr.  Pearsall  Smith's  anthology  almost  at  ran- 
dom and  be  sure  of  lighting  on  a  passage  which  gives  us  a 
characteristic  movement  in  the  symphony  of  horror  and 
hope  that  was  Donne's  contribution  to  the  art  of  prose. 
Listen  to  this,  for  example,  from  a  sermon  preached  in  St. 
Paul's  in  January,  1626: 

Let  me  wither  and  wear  out  mine  age  in  a  discomfortable,  in  an 
unwholesome,  in  a  penurious  prison,  and  so  pay  my  debts  with  my 
bones,  and  recompense  the  wastefulness  of  my  youth  with  the  beggary 
of  mine  age;  let  me  wither  in  a  spittle  under  sharp,  and  foul,  and 
infamous  diseases,  and  so  recompense  the  wantonness  of  my  youth 


46  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

with  that  loathsomeness  in  mine  age;  yet,  if  God  withdraw  not  his 
spiritual  blessings,  his  grace,  his  patience,  if  I  can  call  my  suffering 
his  doing,  my  passion  his  action,  all  this  that  is  temporal,  is  but  a 
caterpillar  got  into  one  corner  of  my  garden,  but  a  mildew  fallen  upon 
one  acre  of  my  corn :  the  body  of  all,  the  substance  of  all  is  safe,  so 
long  as  the  soul  is  safe. 

The  self-contempt  with  which  his  imagination  loved  to 
intoxicate  itself  finds  more  lavish  expression  in  a  passage 
in  a  sermon  delivered  on  Easter  Sunday  two  years  later: 

When  I  consider  what  I  was  in  my  parents'  loins  (a  substance 
unworthy  of  a  word,  unworthy  of  a  thought),  when  I  consider  what 
I  am  now  (a  volume  of  diseases  bound  up  together;  a  dry  cinder,  if 
I  look  for  natural,  for  radical  moisture ;  and  yet  a  sponge,  a  bottle 
of  overflowing  Rheums,  if  I  consider  accidental;  an  aged  child,  a 
grey-headed  infant,  and  but  the  ghost  of  mine  own  youth),  when  I 
consider  what  I  shall  be  at  last,  by  the  hand  of  death,  in  my  grave 
(first,  but  putrefaction,  and,  not  so  much  as  putrefaction;  I  shall 
not  be  able  to  send  forth  so  much  as  ill  air,  not  any  air  at  all,  but 
shall  be  all  insipid,  tasteless,  savourless,  dust ;  for  a  while,  all  worms, 
and  after  a  while,  not  so  much  as  worms,  sordid,  senseless,  nameless 
dust),  when  I  consider  the  past,  and  present,  and  future  state  of  this 
body,  in  this  world,  I  am  able  to  conceive,  able  to  express  the  worst 
that  can  befall  it  in  nature,  and  the  worst  that  can  be  inflicted  on  it  by 
man,  or  fortune.  But  the  least  degree  of  glory  that  God  hath  pre- 
pared for  that  body  in  heaven,  I  am  not  able  to  express,  not  able  to 
conceive. 

Excerpts  of  great  prose  seldom  give  us  that  rounded  and 
final  beauty  which  we  expect  in  a  work  of  art;  and  the 
reader  of  Donne's  Sermons  in  their  latest  form  will  be  wise 
if  he  comes  to  them  expecting  to  find  beauty  piecemeal  and 
tarnished  though  in  profusion.  He  will  be  wise,  too,  not  to 
expect  too  many  passages  of  the  same  intimate  kind  as  that 
famous  confession  in  regard  to  prayer  which  Mr.  Pearsall 
Smith  quotes,  and  which  no  writer  on  Donne  can  afford 
not  to  quote : 

I  throw  myself  down  in  my  chamber,  and  I  call  in,  and  invite  God, 
and  his  angels  thither,  and  when  they  are  there,  I  neglect  God  and 
his  Angels,  for  the  noise  of  a  fly,  for  the  rattling  of  a  coach,  for  the 
whining  of  a  door.  I  talk  on,  in  the  same  posture  of  praying;  eyes 
lifted  up ;  knees  bowed  down ;  as  though  I  prayed  to  God ;  and,  if 
God,  or  his  Angels  should  ask  me,  when  I  thought  last  of  God  in  that 


JOHN  DONNE  47 


prayer,  I  cannot  tell.  Sometimes  I  find  that  I  had  forgot  what  I  was 
about,  but  when  I  began  to  forget  it,  I  cannot  tell.  A  memory  of 
yesterday's  pleasures,  a  fear  of  to-morrow's  dangers,  a  straw  under 
my  knee,  a  noise  in  mine  ear,  a  light  in  mine  eye,  an  anything,  a 
nothing,  a  fancy,  a  chimera  in  my  brain  troubles  me  in  my  prayer. 

If  Donne  had  written  much  prose  in  this  kind,  his  Sermons 
would  be  as  famous  as  the  writings  of  any  of  the  saints 
since  the  days  of  the  Apostles. 

Even  as  it  is,  there  is  no  other  Elizabethan  man  of  letters 
whose  personality  is  an  island  with  a  crooked  shore,  inviting 
us  into  a  thousand  bays  and  creeks  and  river-mouths,  to  the 
same  degree  as  the  personality  that  expressed  itself  in  the 
poems,  sermons,  and  life  of  John  Donne.  It  is  a  mysterious 
and  "at  times  repellent  island.  It  lies  only  intermittently  in 
the  sun.  A  fog  hangs  around  its  coast,  and  at  the  base  of 
its  most  radiant  mountain-tops  there  is,  as  a  rule,  a  miasma- 
infested  swamp.  There  are  jewels  to  be  found  scattered 
among  its  rocks  and  over  its  surface,  and  by  miners  in  the 
dark.  It  is  richer,  indeed,  in  jewels  and  precious  metals 
and  curious  ornaments  than  in  flowers.  The  shepherd  on 
the  hillside  seldom  tells  his  tale  uninterrupted.  Strange 
rites-  in  honour  of  ancient  infernal  deities  that  delight  in 
death  are  practised  in  hidden  places,  and  the  echo  of  these 
reaches  him  on  the  sighs  of  the  wind  and  makes  him 
shudder  even  as  he  looks  at  his  beloved.  It  is  an  island 
with  a  cemetery  smell.  The  chief  figure  who  haunts  it  is  a 
living  man  in  a  winding-sheet.  It  is,  no  doubt,  Walton's 
story  of  the  last  days  of  Donne's  life  that  makes  us,  as  we 
read  even  the  sermons  and  the  love-poems,  so  aware  of  this 
ghostly  apparition.  Donne,  it  will  be  remembered,  almost 
on  the  eve  of  his  death,  dressed  himself  in  a  winding-sheet, 
"  tied  with  knots  at  his  head  and  feet,"  and  stood  on  a 
wooden  urn  with  his  eyes  shut,  and  "  with  so  much  of  the 
sheet  turned  aside  as  might  show  his  lean,  pale,  and  death- 
like face,"  while  a  painter  made  a  sketch  of  him  for  his 
funeral  monument.  He  then  had  the  picture  placed  at  his 
bedside,  to  which  he  summoned  his  friends  and  servants 
in  order  to  bid  them  farewell.  As  he  lay  awaiting  death, 


48  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

he  said  characteristically,  "  I  were  miserable  if  I  might  not 
die/'  and  then  repeatedly,  in  a  faint  voice,  "  Thy  Kingdom 
come,  Thy  will  be  done."  At  the  very  end  he  lost  his 
speech,  and  "  as  his  soul  ascended  and  his  last  breath  de- 
parted from  him  he  closed  his  eyes,  and  then  disposed  his 
hands  and  body  into  such  a  posture  as  required  not  the 
least  alteration  by  those  that  came  to  shroud  him."  It  was 
a  strange  chance  that  preserved  his  spectral  monument 
almost  uninjured  when  St.  Paul's  was  burned  down  in  the 
Great  Fire,  and  no  other  monument  in  the  cathedral  escaped. 
Among  all  his  fantasies  none  remains  in  the  imagination 
more  despotically  than  this  last  fanciful  game  of  dying. 
Donne,  however,  remained  in  all  respects  a  fantastic  to  the 
last,  as  we  may  see  in  that  hymn  which  he  wrote  eight 
days  before  the  end,  tricked  out  with  queer  geography,  and 
so  anciently  egoistic  amid  its  worship,  as  in  the  verse: 

Whilst  my  physicians  by  their  love  are  grown 
Cosmographers,  and  I  their  map,  who  lie 

Flat  on  this  bed,  that  by  them  may  be  shown 
That  this  is  my  south-west  discovery, 
Per  f return  febris,  by  these  straits  to  die.  . 

Donne  was  the  poet-geographer  of  himself,  his  mis- 
tresses, and  his  God.  Other  poets  of  his  time  dived  deeper 
and  soared  to  greater  altitudes,  but  none  travelled  so  far, 
so  curiously,  and  in  such  out-of-the-way  places,  now  hurry- 
ing like  a  nervous  fugitive,  and  now  in  the  exultation  of 
the  first  man  in  a  new  found  land. 


V.— HORACE  WALPOLE  * 

HORACE  WALPOLE  was  "  a  dainty  rogue  in  porcelain  "  who 
walked  badly.  In  his  best  days,  as  he  records  in  one  of  his. 
letters,  it  was  said  of  him  that  he  "tripped  like  a  pewit." 
"  If  I  do  not  flatter  myself,"  he  wrote  when  he  was  just 
under  sixty,  "  my  march  at  present  is  more  like  a  dab- 
chick's."  A  lady  has  left  a  description  of  him  entering  a 
room,  "  knees  bent,  and  feet  on  tiptoe  as  if  afraid  of  a  wet 
floor."  When  his  feet  were  not  swollen  with  the  gout,  they 
were  so  slender,  he  said,  that  he  "  could  dance  a  minuet  on 
a  silver  penny."  He  was  ridiculously  lean,  and  his  hands 
were  crooked  with  his  unmerited  disease.  An  invalid,  a 
caricature  of  the  birds,  and  not  particularly  well  dressed  in 
spite  of  his  lavender  suit  and  partridge  silk  stockings,  he  has 
nevertheless  contrived  to  leave  in  his  letters  an  impression 
of  almost  perfect  grace  and  dandyism.  He  had  all  the  airs 
of  a  beau.  .He  affected  coolness,  disdain,  amateurishness, 
triviality.  He  was  a  china  figure  of  insolence.  He  lived  on 
the  mantelpiece,  and  regarded  everything  that  happened  on 
the  floor  as  a  rather  low  joke  that  could  not  be  helped.  He 
warmed  into  humanity  in  his  friendships  and  in  his  defence 
of  the  house  of  Walpole;  but  if  he  descended  from  his 
mantelpiece,  it  was  more  likely  to  be  in  order  to  feed  a 
squirrel  than  to  save  an  empire.  His  most  common  image 
of  the  world  was  a  puppet-show.  He  saw  kings,  prime 
ministers,  and  men  of  genius  alike  about  the  size  of  dolls. 
When  George  II.  died,  he  wrote  a  brief  note  to  Thomas 
Brand :  "  Dear  Brand — You  love  laughing ;  there  is  a  king 
dead;  can  you  help  coming  to  town?  "  That  represents  his 
measure  of  things.  Those  who  love  laughing  will  laugh  all 
the  more  when  they  discover  that,  a  week  earlier,  Walpole 

*  Letters  of  Horace  Walpole;  Oxford  University  Press,  16  vols., 
96s.  Supplementary  Letters,  1919;  Oxford  University  Press,  2  vols., 
17s. 


50  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

had  written  a  letter,  rotund,  fulsome,  and  in  the  language 
of  the  bended  knee,  begging  Lord  Bute  to  be  allowed  to  kiss 
the  Prince  of  Wales's  hand.  His  attitude  to  the  Court  he 
described  to  George  Montagu  as  "  mixing  extreme  polite- 
ness with  extreme  indifference."  His  politeness,  like  his 
indifference,  was  but  play  at  the  expense  of  a  solemn  world. 
"I  wrote  to  Lord  Bute,"  he  informed  Montagu;  "thrust 
all  the  unexpecteds,  want  of  ambition,  disinterestedness, 
etc.,  that  I  could  amass,  gilded  with  as  much  duty,  affection, 
zeal,  etc.,  as  possible."  He  frankly  professed  relief  that  he 
had  not  after  all  to  go  to  Court  and  act  out  the  extravagant 
compliments  he  had  written.  "  Was  ever  so  agreeable  a 
man  as  King  George  the  Second,"  he  wrote,  "  to  die  the 
very  day  it  was  necessary  to  save  me  from  ridicule?" 
"  For  my  part,"  he  adds  later  in  the  same  spirit,  "  my  man 
Harry  will  always  be  a  favourite ;  he  tells  me  all  the  amus- 
ing news;  he  first  told  me  of  the  late  Prince  of  Wales's 
death,  and  to-day  of  the  King's."  It  is  not  that  Walpole 
was  a  republican  of  the  school  of  Plutarch.  He  was  merely 
a  toy  republican  who  enjoyed  being  insolent  at  the  expense 
of  kings,  and  behind  their  backs.  He  was  scarcely  capable 
of  open  rudeness  in  the  fashion  of  Beau  Brummell's 
"  Who's  your  fat  friend  ? "  His  ridicule  was  never  a 
public  display;  it  was  a  secret  treasured  for  his  friends.  He 
was  the  greatest  private  entertainer  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury, and  he  ridiculed  the  great,  as  people  say,  for  the  love 
of  diversion.  "  I  always  write  the  thoughts  of  the  mo- 
ment," he  told  the  dearest  of  his  friends,  Conway,  "  and 
even  laugh  to  divert  the  person  I  am  writing  to,  without 
any  ill  will  on  the  subjects  I  mention."  His  letters  are  for 
the  most  part  those  of  a  good-natured  man. 

It  is  not  that  he  was  above  the  foible — it  was  barely  more 
than  that — of  hatred.  He  did  not  trouble  greatly  about 
enemies  of  his  own,  but  he  never  could  forgive  the  enemies 
of  Sir  Robert  Walpole.  His  ridicule  of  the  Duke  of  New- 
castle goes  far  beyond  diversion.  It  is  the  baiting  of  a 
mean  and  treacherous  animal,  whose  teeth  were  "  tumbling 
out,"  and  whose  mouth  was  "  tumbling  in."  Tie  rejoices  in 


HORACE   WALPOLE  51 

the  exposure  of  the  dribbling  indignity  of  the  Duke,  as 
when  he  describes  him  going  to  Court  on  becoming  Prime 
Minister  in  1754: 

On  Friday  this  august  remnant  of  the  Pelhams  went  to  Court  for 
the  first  time.  At  the  foot  of  the  stairs  he  cried  and  sunk  down; 
the  yeomen  of  the  guard  were  forced  to  drag  him  up  under  the  arms. 
When  the  closet-door  opened,  he  flung  himself  at  his  length  at  the 
King's  feet,  sobbed,  and  cried,  "God  bless  your  Majesty!  God  pre- 
serve your  Majesty!"  and  lay  there  howling,  embracing  the  King's 
knees,  with  one  foot  so  extended  that  my  Lord  Coventry,  who  was 
luckily  in  waiting,  and  begged  the  standers-by  to  retire,  with,  "  For 
God's  sake,  gentlemen,  don't  look  at  a  great  man  in  distress ! "  en- 
deavouring to  shut  the  door,  caught  his  grace's  foot,  and  made  him 
roar  with  pain. 

The  caricature  of  the  Duke  is  equally  merciless  in  the 
description  of  George  II. 's  funeral  in  the  Abbey,  in  which 
the  "  burlesque  Duke  "  is  introduced  as  comic  relief  into 
the  solemn  picture : 

He  fell  into  a  fit  of  crying  the  moment  he  came  into  the  chapel, 
and  flung  himself  back  in  a  stall,  the  Archbishop  hovering  over  him 
with  a  smelling-bottle ;  but  in  two  minutes  his  curiosity  got  the  better 
of  his  hypocrisy,  and  he  ran  about  the  chapel  with  his  glass  to  spy 
who  was  or  was  not  there,  spying  with  one  hand  and  mopping  his 
eyes  with  the  other.  Then  returned  the  fear  of  catching  cold ;  and 
the  Duke  of  Cumberland,  who  was  sinking  with  heat,  felt  himself 
weighed  down,  and  turning  round  found  it  was  the  Duke  of  New- 
castle standing  upon  his  train  to  avoid  the  chill  of  the  marble. 

Walpole,  indeed,  broke  through  his  habit  of  public 
decorum  in  his  persecution  of  the  Duke;  and  he  tells  how 
on  one  occasion  at  a  ball  at  Bedford  House  he  and  Brand 
and  George  Selwyn  plagued  the  pitiful  old  creature,  who 
"  wriggled,  and  shuffled,  and  lisped,  and  winked,  and  spied  " 
his  way  through  the  company,  with  a  conversation  at  his 
expense  carried  on  in  stage  whispers.  There  was  never  a 
more  loyal  son  than  Horace  Walpole.  He  offered  up  a 
Prime  Minister  daily  as  a  sacrifice  at  Sir  Robert's  tomb. 

At  the  same  time,  his  aversions  were  not  always  assumed 
as  part  of  a  family  inheritance.  He  had  by  temperament  a 


52  THE  AET  OF  LETTERS 

small  opinion  of  men  and  women  outside  the  circle  of  his 
affections.  It  was  his  first  instinct  to  disparage.  He  even 
described  his  great  friend  Madame  du  Deffand,  at  the  first 
time  of  meeting  her,  as  "  an  old  blind  debauchee  of  wit." 
His  comments  on  the  men  of  genius  of  his  time  are  almost 
all  written  in  a  vein  of  satirical  intolerance.  He  spoke  ill 
of  Sterne  and  Dr.  Johnson,  of  Fielding  and  Richardson,  of 
Boswell  and  Goldsmith.  Goldsmith  he  found  "  silly  " ;  he 
was  "  an  idiot  with  once  or  twice  a  fit  of  parts."  Boswell's 
Tour  of  the  Hebrides  was  "  the  story  of  a  mountebank 
and  his  zany"  Walpole  felt  doubly  justified  in  disliking 
Johnson  owing  to  the  criticism  of  Gray  in  the  Lives  of  the 
Poets.  He  would  not  even,  when  Johnson  died,  subscribe 
to  a  monument.  A  circular  letter  asking  for  a  subscription 
was  sent  to  him,  signed  by  Burke,  Boswell,  and  Reynolds. 
"  I  would  not  deign  to  write  an  answer,"  Walpole  told  the 
Miss  Berrys,  "  but  sent  down  word  by  my  footman,  as  I 
would  have  done  to  parish  officers  with  a  brief,  that  I  would 
not  subscribe."  Walpole  does  not  appear  in  this  incident 
the  "  sweet-tempered  creature  "  he  had  earlier  claimed  to 
be.  His  pose  is  that  of  a  schoolgirl  in  a  cutting  mood.  At 
the  same  time  his  judgment  of  Johnson  has  an  element  of 
truth  in  it.  "  Though  he  was  good-natured  at  bottom,"  he 
said  of  him,  "  he  was  very  ill-natured  at  top."  It  has  often 
been  said  of  Walpole  that,  in  his  attitude  to  contemporary 
men  of  genius,  he  was  influenced  mainly  by  their  position 
in  Society — that  he  regarded  an  author  who  was  not  a 
gentleman  as  being  necessarily  an  inferior  author.  This  is 
hardly  fair.  The  contemporary  of  whom  he  thought  most 
highly  was  Gray,  the  son  of  a  money  broker.  He  did  not 
spare  Lady  Mary  Wortley  Montagu  any  more  than  Rich- 
ardson. If  he  found  an  author  offensive,  it  was  more  likely 
to  be  owing  to  a  fastidious  distaste  for  low  life  than  to  an 
aristocratic  distaste  for  low  birth ;  and  to  him  Bohemianism 
was  the  lowest  of  low  life.  It  was  certainly  Fielding's 
Bohemianism  that  disgusted  him.  He  relates  how  two  of 
his  friends  called  on  Fielding  one  evening  and  found  him 
"  banqueting  with  a  blind  man,  a  woman,  and  three  Irish- 


HORACE  WALPOLE  53 

men,  on  some  cold  mutton  and  a  bone  of  ham,  both  in  one 
dish,  and  the  dirtiest  cloth."  Horace  Walpole's  daintiness 
recoiled  from  the  spirit  of  an  author  who  did  not  know  how 
to  sup  decently.  If  he  found  Boswell's  Johnson  tedious,  it 
was  no  doubt  partly  due  to  his  inability  to  reconcile  himself 
to  Johnson's  table  manners.  It  can  hardly  be  denied  that 
he  was  unnaturally  sensitive  to  surface  impressions.  He 
was  a  great  observer  of  manners,  but  not  a  great  portrayer 
of  character.  He  knew  men  in  their  absurd  actions  rather 
than  in  their  motives — even  their  absurd  motives.  He  never 
admits  us  into  the  springs  of  action  in  his  portraits  as 
Saint-Simon  does.  He  was  too  studied  a  believer  in  the 
puppetry  of  men  and  women  to  make  them  more  than 
ridiculous.  And  unquestionably  the  vain  race  of  authors 
lent  itself  admirably  to  his  love  of  caricature.  His  account 
of  the  vanity  of  Gibbon,  whose  history  he  admired  this  side 
enthusiasm,  shows  how  he  delighted  in  playing  with  an 
egoistic  author  as  with  a  trout: 

You  will  be  diverted  to  hear  that  Mr.  Gibbon  has  quarrelled  with 
me.  He  lent  me  his  second  volume  in  the  middle  of  November.  I 
returned  it  with  a  most  civil  panegyric.  He  came  for  more  incense. 
I  gave  it,  but,  alas,  with  too  much  sincerity !  I  added,  "  Mr.  Gibbon, 
I  am  sorry  you  should  have  pitched  on  so  disgusting  a  subject  as  the 
Constantinopolitan  History.  There  is  so  much  of  the  Arians  and 
Eumonians,  and  semi-Pelagians;  and  there  is  such  a  strange  contrast 
between  Roman  and  Gothic  manners,  and  so  little  harmony  between 
a  Consul  Sabinus  and  a  Ricimer,  Duke  of  the  palace,  that  though 
you  have  written  the  story  as  well  as  it  could  be  written,  I  fear  few 
will  have  patience  to  read  it."  He  coloured;  all  his  round  features 
squeezed  themselves  into  sharp  angles;  he  screwed  up  his  button 
mouth,  and  rapping  his  snuff-box,  said,  "  It  had  never  been  put 
together  before  " — so  well  he  meant  to  add — but  gulped  it.  He  meant 
so  well  certainly,  for  Tillemont,  whom  he  quotes  in  every  page,  has 
done  the  very  thing.  Well,  from  that  hour  to  this  I  have  never  seen 
him,  though  he  used  to  call  once  or  twice  a  week;  nor  has  he  sent  me 
the  third  volume,  as  he  promised.  I  well  knew  his  vanity,  even  about 
his  ridiculous  face  and  person,  but  thought  he  had  too  much  sense  to 
avow  it  so  palpably. 

"  So  much,"  he  concludes,  "  for  literature  and  its  fops." 
The  comic  spirit  leans  to  an  under-estimate  rather  than  an 


54  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

over-estimate  of  human  nature,  and  the  airs  the  authors 
gave  themselves  were  not  only  a  breach  of  his  code,  but  an 
invitation  to  his  contempt.  "  You  know,"  he  once  wrote, 
"  I  shun  authors,  and  would  never  have  been  one  myself  if 
it  obliged  me  to  keep  such  bad  company.  They  are  always 
in  earnest  and  think  their  profession  serious,  and  will  dwell 
upon  trifles  and  reverence  learning.  I  laugh  at  all  these 
things,  and  write  only  to  laugh  at  them  and  divert  myself. 
None  of  us  are  authors  of  any  consequence,  and  it  is  the 
most  ridiculous  of  all  vanities  to  be  vain  of  being  mediocre." 
He  followed  the  Chinese  school  of  manners  and  made  light 
of  his  own  writings.  "  What  have  I  written,"  he  asks, 
"  that  was  worth  remembering,  even  by  myself  ?  "  "  It 
would  be  affected,"  he  tells  Gray,  "  to  say  I  am  indifferent 
to  fame.  I  certainly  am  not,  but  I  am  indifferent  to  almost 
anything  I  have  done  to  acquire  it.  The  greater  part  are 
mere  compilations;  and  no  wonder  they  are,  as  you  say, 
incorrect  when  they  were  commonly  written  with  people  in 
the  room." 

It  is  generally  assumed  that,  in  speaking  lightly  of  him- 
self, Walpole  was  merely  posturing.  To  me  it  seems  that 
he  was  sincere  enough.  He  had  a  sense  of  greatness  in 
literature,  as  is  shown  by  his  reverence  of  Shakespeare,  and 
he  was  too  much  of  a  realist  not  to  see  that  his  own  writ- 
ings at  their  best  were  trifles  beside  the  monuments  of  the 
poets.  He  felt  that  he  was  doing  little  things  in  a  little 
age.  He  was  diffident  both  for  his  times  and  for  himself. 
So  difficult  do  some  writers  find  it  to  believe  that  there  was 
any  deep  genuineness  in  him  that  they  ask  us  to  regard  even 
his  enthusiasm  for  great  literature  as  a  pretence.  They  do 
not  realize  that  the  secret  of  his  attraction  for  us  is  that  he 
was  an  enthusiast  disguised  as  an  eighteenth-century  man  of 
fashion.  His  airs  and  graces  were  not  the  result  of  languor, 
but  of  his  pleasure  in  wearing  a  mask.  He  was  quick, 
responsive,  excitable,  and  only  withdrew  into  the  similitude 
of  a  china  figure,  as  Diogenes  into  his  tub,  through  philos- 
ophy. The  truth  is,  the  only  dandies  who  are  tolerable  are 
those  whose  dandyism  is  a  cloak  of  reserve.  Our  interest  in 


HORACE  WALPOLE  55 

character  is  largely  an  interest  in  contradictions  of  this  kind. 
The  beau  capable  of  breaking  into  excitement  awakens  our 
curiosity,  as  does  the  conqueror  stooping  to  a  humane 
action,  the  Puritan  caught  in  the  net  of  the  senses,  or  the 
pacifist  in  a  rage  of  violence.  The  average  man,  whom  one 
knows  superficially,  is  a  formula,  or  seems  to  live  the  life 
of  a  formula.  That  is  why  we  find  him  dull.  The  charac- 
ters who  interest  us  in  history  and  literature,  on  the  other 
hand,  are  perpetually  giving  the  lie  to  the  formulae  we  in- 
vent, and  are  bound  to  invent,  for  them.  They  give  us 
pleasure  not  by  confirming  us,  but  by  surprising  us.  It 
seems  to  me  absurd,  then,  to  regard  Walpole's  air  of  indif- 
ference as  the  only  real  thing  about  him  and  to  question 
his  raptures.  From  his  first  travels  among  the  Alps  with 
Gray  down  to  his  senile  letters  to  Hannah  More  about  the 
French  Revolution,  we  see  him  as  a  man  almost  hysterical 
in  the  intensity  of  his  sensations,  whether  of  joy  or  of  hor- 
ror. He  lived  for  his  sensations  like  an  aesthete.  He  wrote 
of  himself  as  "  I,  who  am  as  constant  at  a  fire  as  George 
Selwyn  at  an  execution."  If  he  cared  for  the  crownings  of 
kings  and  such  occasions,  it  was  because  he  took  a  childish 
delight  in  the  fireworks  and  illuminations. 

He  had  the  keen  spirit  of  a  masquerader.  Masquerades, 
he  declared,  were  "  one  of  my  ancient  passions,"  and  we 
find  him  as  an  elderly  man  dressing  out  "  a  thousand  young 
Conways  and  Cholmondeleys  "  for  an  entertainment  of  the 
kind,  and  going  "  with  more  pleasure  to  see  them  pleased 
than  when  I  formerly  delighted  in  that  diversion  myself." 
He  was  equally  an  enthusiast  in  his  hobbies  and  his  tastes. 
He  rejoiced  to  get  back  in  May  to  Strawberry  Hill,  "  where 
my  two  passions,  lilacs  and  nightingales,  are  in  bloom." 
He  could  not  have  made  his  collections  or  built  his  battle- 
ments in  a  mood  of  indifference.  In  his  love  of  mediaeval 
ruins  he  showed  himself  a  Goth-intoxicated  man.  As  for 
Strawberry  Hill  itself,  the  result  may  have  been  a  ridiculous 
mouse,  but  it  took  a  mountain  of  enthusiasm  to  produce  it. 
Walpole's  own  description  of  his  house  and  its  surround- 
ings has  an  exquisite  charm  that  almost  makes  one  love  the 


56  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

place  as  he  did.  "  It  is  a  little  plaything  house,"  he  told 
Conway,  "  that  I  got  out  of  Mrs.  Chenevix's  shop,  and  is 
the  prettiest  bauble  you  ever  saw.  It  is  set  in  enamelled 
meadows,  with  filigree  hedges : 

A  small  Euphrates  through  the  piece  is  roll'd, 
And  little  finches  wave  their  wings  in  gold." 

He  goes  on  to  decorate  the  theme  with  comic  and  fanciful 
properties : 

Two  delightful  roads  that  you  would  call  dusty  supply  me  con- 
tinually with  coaches  and  chaises ;  barges  as  solemn  as  barons  of  the 
exchequer  move  under  my  window;  Richmond  Hill  and  Ham-walks 
bound  my  prospect;  but,  thank  God,  the  Thames  is  between  me  and 
the  Duchess  of  Queensberry.  Dowagers  as  plenty  as  flounders 
inhabit  all  around,  and  Pope's  ghost  is  just  now  skimming  under  my 
window  by  a  most  poetical  moonlight.  I  have  about  land  enough  to 
keep  such  a  farm  as  Noah's  when  he  set  up  in  the  Ark  with  a  pair  of 
each  kind. 

It  is  in  the  spirit  of  a  child  throwing  its  whole  imagina- 
tion into  playing  with  a  Noah's  Ark  that  he  describes  his 
queer  house.  It  is  in  this  spirit  that  he  sees  the  fields  around 
his  house  "  speckled  with  cows,  horses  and  sheep."  The 
very  phrase  suggests  toy  animals.  Walpole  himself  declared 
at  the  age  of  seventy-three :  "  My  best  wisdom  has  con- 
sisted in  forming  a  baby-house  full  of  playthings  for  my 
second  childhood."  That  explains  why  one  almost  loves 
the  creature.  Macaulay  has  severely  censured  him  for  de- 
voting himself  to  the  collection  of  knick-knacks,  such  as 
King  William  III.'s  spurs,  and  it  is  apparently  impossible 
to  defend  Walpole  as  a  collector  to  be  taken  seriously. 
Walpole,  however,  collected  things  in  a  mood  of  fantasy  as 
much  as  of  connoisseurship.  He  did  not  take  himself  quite 
seriously.  It  was  fancy,  not  connoisseurship,  that  made 
him  hang  up  Magna  Charta  beside  his  bed  and,  opposite  it, 
the  warrant  for  the  execution  of  King  Charles  I.,  on  which 
he  had  written  "  Major  Charta."  Who  can  question  the 
fantastic  quality  of  the  mind  that  wrote  to  Conway: 
"  Remember,  neither  Lady  Salisbury  nor  you,  nor  Mrs. 
Darner,  have  seen  my  new  divine  closet,  nor  the  billiard- 


HORACE  WALPOLE  57 

sticks  with  which  the  Countess  of  Pembroke  and  Arcadia 
used  to  play  with  her  brother,  Sir  Philip,"  and  ended :  "  I 
never  did  see  Cotchel,  and  am  sorry.  Is  not  the  old  ward- 
robe there  still?  There  was  one  from  the  time  of  Cain,  but 
Adam's  breeches  and  Eve's  under-petticoat  were  eaten  by 
a  goat  in  the  ark.  Good-night."  He  laughed  over  the 
knick-knacks  he  collected  for  himself  and  his  friends.  "  As 
to  snuff-boxes  and  toothpick  cases,"  he  wrote  to  the 
Countess  of  Ossory  from  Paris  in  1771,  "the  vintage  has 
entirely  failed  this  year."  Everything  that  he  turned  his 
mind  to  in  Strawberry  Hill  he  regarded  in  the  same  spirit 
of  comic  delight.  He  stood  outside  himself,  like  a  spec- 
tator, and  nothing  gave  him  more  pleasure  than  to  figure 
himself  as  a  master  of  the  ceremonies  among  the  bantams, 
and  the  squirrels  and  the  goldfish.  In  one  of  his  letters  he 
describes  himself  and  Bentley  fishing  in  the  pond  for  gold- 
fish with  "  nothing  but  a  pail  and  a  basin  and  a  tea-strainer, 
which  I  persuade  my  neighbours  is  the  Chinese  method." 
This  was  in  order  to  capture  some  of  the  fish  for  Bentley, 
who  "  carried  a  dozen  to  town  t'other  day  in  a  decanter." 
Walpole  is  similarly  amused  by  the  spectacle  of  himself  as 
a  planter  and  gardener.  "  I  have  made  great  progress,"  he 
boasts,  "  and  talk  very  learnedly  with  the  nursery-men, 
except  that  now  and  then  a  lettuce  runs  to  seed,  overturns 
all  my  botany,  and  I  have  more  than  once  taken  it  for  a 
curious  West  Indian  flowering  shrub.  Then  the  delibera- 
tion with  which  trees  grow  is  extremely  inconvenient  to  my 
natural  impatience."  He  goes  on  enviously  to  imagine  the 
discovery  by  posterity  of  a  means  of  transplanting  oaks  of 
a  hundred  and  fifty  years  as  easily  as  tulip-bulbs.  This 
leads  him  to  enlarge  upon  the  wonders  that  the  Horace  Wal- 
pole of  posterity  will  be  able  to  possess  when  the  miraculous 
discoveries  have  been  made. 

Then  the  delightfulness  of  having  whole  groves  of  humming-birds, 
tame  tigers  taught  to  fetch  and  carry,  pocket  spying-glasses  to  see  all 
that  is  doing  in  China,  and  a  thousand  other  toys,  which  we  now 
look  upon  as  impracticable,  and  which  pert  posterity  would  laugh  in 
our  face  for  staring  at. 


58  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

Among  the  various  creatures  with  which  he  loved  to 
surround  himself,  it  is  impossible  to  forget  either  the  little 
black  spaniel,  Tony,  that  the  wolf  carried  off  near  a  wood 
in  the  Alps  during  his  first  travels,  or  the  more  imperious 
little  dog,  Tonton,  which  he  has  constantly  to  prevent  from 
biting  people  at  Madame  du  Deffand's,  but  which  with 
Madame  du  Deffand  herself  "  grows  the  greater  favourite 
the  more  people  he  devours."  "  T'other  night,"  writes 
Walpole,  to  whom  Madame  du  Deffand  afterwards  be- 
queathed the  dog  in  her  will,  "  he  flew  at  Lady  Barrymore's 
face,  and  I  thought  would  have  torn  her  eye  out,  but  it 
ended  in  biting  her  finger.  She  was  terrified ;  she  fell  into 
tears.  Madame  du  Deffand,  who  has  too  much  parts  not  to 
see  everything  in  its  true  light,  perceiving  that  she  had  not 
beaten  Tonton  half  enough,  immediately  told  us  a  story  of 
a  lady  whose  dog  having  bitten  a  piece  out  of  a  gentleman's 
leg,  the  tender  dame,  in  a  great  fright,  cried  out,  '  Won't 
it  make  him  sick  ?  '  In  the  most  attractive  accounts  we 
possess  of  Walpole  in  his  old  age,  we  see  him  seated  at  the 
breakfast-table,  drinking  tea  out  of  "  most  rare  and  precious 
ancient  porcelain  of  Japan,"  and  sharing  the  loaf  and  butter 
with  Tonton  (now  grown  almost  too  fat  to  move,  and 
spread  on  a  sofa  beside  him),  and  afterwards  going  to  the 
window  with  a  basin  of  bread  and  milk  to  throw  to  the 
squirrels  in  the  garden. 

Many  people  would  be  willing  to  admit,  however,  that 
Walpole  was  an  excitable  creature  where  small  things  were 
concerned — a  parroquet  or  the  prospect  of  being  able  to 
print  original  letters  of  Ninon  de  1'Enclos  at  Strawberry, 
or  the  discovery  of  a  poem  by  the  brother  of  Anne  Boleyn, 
or  Ranelagh,  where  "  the  floor  is  all  of  beaten  princes." 
What  is  not  generally  realized  is  that  he  was  also  a  high- 
strung  and  eager  spectator  of  the  greater  things.  I  have 
already  spoken  of  his  enthusiasm  for  wild  nature  as  shown 
in  his  letters  from  the  Alps.  It  is  true  he  grew  weary  of 
them.  "  Such  uncouth  rocks,"  he  wrote,  "  and  such  un- 
comely inhabitants."  "  I  am  as  surfeited  with  mountains 
and  inns  as  if  I  had  eat  them,"  he  groaned  in  a  later  letter. 


HORACE  WALPOLE  59 

But  the  enthusiasm  was  at  least  as  genuine  as  the  fatigue. 
His  tergiversation  of  mood  proves  only  that  there  were  two 
Walpoles,  not  that  the  Walpole  of  the  romantic  enthusiasms 
was  insincere.  He  was  a  devotee  of  romance,  but  it  was 
romance  under  the  control  of  the  comic  spirit.  He  was 
always  amused  to  have  romance  brought  down  to  reality,  as 
when,  writing  of  Mary  Queen  of  Scots,  he  said :  "  I  believe 
I  have  told  you  that,  in  a  very  old  trial  of  her,  which  I 
bought  for  Lord  Oxford's  collection,  it  is  said  that  she 
was  a  large  lame  woman.  Take  sentiments  out  of  their 
pantauftes,  and  reduce  them  to  the  infirmities  of  mortality, 
what  a  falling  off  there  is !  "  But  see  him  in  the  picture- 
gallery  in  his  father's  old  house  at  Houghton,  after  an 
absence  of  sixteen  years,  and  the  romantic  mood  is  upper- 
most. "  In  one  respect,"  he  writes,  speaking  of  the  pictures, 
"  I  am  very  young;  I  cannot  satiate  myself  with  looking," 
and  he  adds,  "  Not  a  picture  here  but  calls  a  history ;  not 
one  but  I  remember  in  Downing  Street  or  Chelsea,  where 
queens  and  crowds  admired  them."  And,  if  he  could  not 
"  satiate  himself  with  looking  "  at  the  Italian  and  Flemish 
masters,  he  similarly  preserved  the  heat  of  youth  in  his 
enthusiasm  for  Shakespeare.  "  When,"  he  wrote,  during 
his  dispute  with  Voltaire  on  the  point,  "  I  think  over  all  the 
great  authors  of  the  Greeks,  Romans,  Italians,  French  and 
English  (and  I  know  no  other  languages),  I  set  Shake- 
speare first  and  alone  and  then  begin  anew."  One  is  aston- 
ished to  find  that  he  was  contemptuous  of  Montaigne. 
"  What  signifies  what  a  man  thought,"  he  wrote,  "  who 
never  thought  of  anything  but  himself,  and  what  signifies 
what  a  man  did  who  never  did  anything?  "  This  sentence 
might  have  served  as  a  condemnation  of  Walpole  himself, 
and  indeed  he  meant  it  so.  Walpole,  however,  was  an  egoist 
of  an  opposite  kind  to  Montaigne.  Walpole  lived  for  his 
eyes,  and  saw  the  world  as  a  masque  of  bright  and  amusing 
creatures.  Montaigne  studied  the  map  of  himself  rather 
than  the  map  of  his  neighbours'  vanities.  Walpole  was  a 
social  being,  and  not  finally  self-centred.  His  chief  purpose 
in  life  was  not  to  know  himself,  but  to  give  pleasure  to  his 


60  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

friends.  If  he  was  bored  by  Montaigne,  it  was  because  he 
had  little  introspective  curiosity.  Like  Montaigne  himself, 
however,  he  was  much  the  servant  of  whim  in  his  literary 
tastes.  That  he  was  no  sceptic  but  a  disciple  as  regards 
Shakespeare  and  Milton  and  Pope  and  Gray  suggests,  on 
the  other  hand,  how  foolish  it  is  to  regard  him  as  being 
critically  a  fashionable  trifler. 

Not  that  it  is  possible  to  represent  him  as  a  man  with 
anything  Dionysiac  in  his  temperament.  The  furthest  that 
one  can  go  is  to  say  that  he  was  a  man  of  sincere  strong 
sentiment  with  quivering  nerves.  Capricious  in  little  things, 
he  was  faithful  in  great.  His  warmth  of  nature  as  a  son, 
as  a  friend,  as  a  humanitarian,  as  a  believer  in  tolerance 
and  liberty,  is  so  unfailing  that  it  is  curious  it  should  ever 
have  been  brought  in  question  by  any  reader  of  the  letters. 
His  quarrels  are  negligible  when  put  beside  his  ceaseless 
extravagance  of  good  humour  to  his  friends.  His  letters 
alone  were  golden  gifts,  but  we  also  find  him  offering  his 
fortune  to  Conway  when  the  latter  was  in  difficulties.  "  I 
have  sense  enough,"  he  wrote,  "  to  have  real  pleasure  in 
denying  myself  baubles,  and  in  saving  a  very  good  income 
to  make  a  man  happy  for  whom  I  have  a  just  esteem  and 
most  sincere  friendship."  "  Blameable  in  ten  thousand 
other  respects,"  he  wrote  to  Conway  seventeen  years  later, 
"may  not  I  almost  say  I  am  perfect  with  regard  to  you? 
Since  I  was  fifteen  have  I  not  loved  you  unalterably?  "  "  I 
am,"  he  claimed  towards  the  end  of  his  life,  "  very  constant 
and  sincere  to  friends  of  above  forty  years."  In  his  friend- 
ships he  was  more  eager  to  give  than  to  receive.  Madame 
du  Deffand  was  only  dissuaded  from  making  him  her  heir 
by  his  threat  that  if  she  did  so  he  would  never  visit  her 
again.  Ever  since  his  boyhood  he  was  noted  for  his  love 
of  giving  pleasure  and  for  his  thought  fulness  regarding 
those  he  loved.  The  earliest  of  his  published  letters  was 
until  recently  one  written  at  the  age  of  fourteen.  But  Dr. 
Paget  Toynbee,  in  his  supplementary  volumes  of  Walpole 
letters,  recently  published,  has  been  able  to  print  one  to  Lady 
Walpole  written  at  the  age  of  eight,  which  suggests  that 


HORACE  WALPOLE  61 

Walpole  was  a  delightful  sort  of  child,  incapable  of  for- 
getting a  parent,  a  friend,  or  a  pet: 

Dear  mama,  I  hop  you  are  wall,  and  I  am  very  wall,  and  I  hop 
papa  is  wal,  and  I  begin  to  slaap,  and  I  hop  al  wall  and  my  cosens 
like  there  pla  things  vary  wall 
and  I  hop  Doly  phillips  is  wall  and  pray  give  my  Duty  to  papa. 

HORACE  WALPOLE. 

and  I  am  very  glad  to  hear  by  Tom  that  all  my  cruatuars  are  all  wall, 
and  Mrs.  Selwyn  has  sprand  her  Fot  and  givs  her  Sarves  to  you  and 
I  dind  ther  yester  Day. 

At  Eton  later  on  he  was  a  member  of  two  leagues  of 
friendship — the  "  Triumvirate,"  as  it  was  called,  which  in- 
cluded the  two  Montagus,  and  the  "Quadruple  Alliance," 
in  which  one  of  his  fellows  was  Gray.  The  truth  is,  Wal- 
pole was  always  a  person  who  depended  greatly  on  being 
loved.  "  One  loves  to  find  people  care  for  one,"  he  wrote 
to  Conway,  "  when  they  can  have  no  view  in  it."  His 
friendship  in  his  old  age  for  the  Miss  Berrys — his  "  twin 
wifes,"  his  "  dear  Both  " — to  each  of  whom  he  left  an 
annuity  of  £4,000,  was  but  a  continuation  of  that  kindliness 
which  ran  like  a  stream  (ruffled  and  sparkling  with  malice, 
no  doubt)  through  his  long  life.  And  his  kindness  was 
not  limited  to  his  friends,  but  was  at  the  call  of  children 
and,  as  we  have  seen,  of  animals.  "  You  know,"  he  ex- 
plains to  Conway,  apologizing  for  not  being  able  to  visit 
him  on  account  of  the  presence  of  a  "  poor  little  sick  girl " 
at  Strawberry  Hill,  "  how  courteous  a  knight  I  am  to 
distrest  virgins  of  five  years  old,  and  that  my  castle  gates 
are  always  open  to  them."  One  does  not  think  of  Walpole 
primarily  as  a  squire  of  children,  and  certainly,  though  he 
loved  on  occasion  to  romp  with  the  young,  there  was  little 
in  him  of  a  Dickens  character.  But  he  was  what  is  called 
"  sympathetic."  He  was  sufficient  of  a  man  of  imagination 
to  wish  to  see  an  end  put  to  the  sufferings  of  "  those  poor 
victims,  chimney-sweepers."  So  far  from  being  a  heartless 
person,  as  he  has  been  at  times  portrayed,  he  had  a  heart 
as  sensitive  as  an  anti-vivisectionist.  This  was  shown  in 
his  attitude  to  animals.  In  1760,  when  there  was  a  great 


62  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

terror  of  mad  dogs  in  London,  and  an  order  was  issued 
that  all  dogs  found  in  the  streets  were  to  be  killed,  he  wrote 
to  the  Earl  of  Strafford: 

In  London  there  is  a  more  cruel  campaign  than  that  waged  by  the 
Russians :  the  streets  are  a  very  picture  of  the  murder  of  the 
innocents — one  drives  over  nothing  but  poor  dead  dogs !  The  dear, 
good-natured,  honest,  sensible  creatures  1  Christ !  how  can  anybody 
hurt  them?  Nobody  could  but  those  Cherokees  the  English,  who 
desire  no  better  than  to  be  halloo'd  to  blood — one  day  Samuel  Byng, 
the  next  Lord  George  Sackville,  and  to-day  the  poor  dogs ! 

As  for  Walpole's  interest  in  politics,  we  are  told  by  writer, 
after  writer  that  he  never  took  them  seriously,  but  was  inter- 
ested in  them  mainly  for  gossip's  sake.  It  cannot  be  denied 
that  he  made  no  great  fight  for  good  causes  while  he  sat 
in  the  House  of  Commons.  Nor  had  he  the  temper  of  a 
ruler  of  men.  But  as  a  commentator  on  politics  and  a 
spreader  of  opinion  in  private,  he  showed  himself  to  be  a 
politician  at  once  sagacious,  humane,  and  sensitive  to  the 
meaning  of  events.  His  detestation  of  the  arbitrary  use  of 
power  had  almost  the  heat  of  a  passion.  He  detested  it 
alike  in  a  government  and  in  a  mob.  He  loathed  the  vio- 
lence that  compassed  the  death  of  Admiral  Byng  and  the 
violence  that  made  war  on  America.  He  raged  against  a 
public  world  that  he  believed  was  going  to  the  devil.  "  I 
am  not  surprised,"  he  wrote  in  1776,  "at  the  idea  of  the 
devil  being  always  at  our  elbows.  They  who  invented  him 
no  doubt  could  not  conceive  how  men  could  be  so  atrocious 
to  one  another,  without  the  intervention  of  a  fiend.  Don't 
you  think,  if  he  had  never  been  heard  of  before,  that  he 
would  have  been  invented  on  the  late  partition  of  Poland?  " 
"Philosophy  has  a  poor  chance  with  me,"  he  wrote  a  little 
later  in  regard  to  America.  "  when  my  warmth  is  stirred— 
and  yet  I  know  that  an  angry  old  man  out  of  Parliament, 
and  that  can  do  nothing  but  be  angry,  is  a  ridiculous  ani- 
mal." The  war  against  America  he  described  as  "  a 
wretched  farce  of  fear  daubed  over  with  airs  of  bullying." 
War  at  any  time  was,  in  his  eyes,  all  but  the  unforgivable 
sin.  In  1781,  however,  his  hatred  had  lightened  into  con- 


HORACE  WALPOLE  63 

tempt.  "  The  Dutch  fleet  is  hovering  about,"  he  wrote, 
"  but  it  is  a  pickpocket  war,  and  not  a  martial  one,  and  I 
never  attend  to  petty  larceny."  As  for  mobs,  his  attitude 
to  them  is  to  be  seen  in  his  comment  on  the  Wilkes  riots, 
when  he  declares : 

I  cannot  bear  to  have  the  name  of  Liberty  profaned  to  the  destruc- 
tion of  the  cause;  for  frantic  tumults  only  lead  to  that  terrible  correc- 
tive, Arbitrary  Power — which  cowards  call  out  for  as  protection,  and 
knaves  are  so  ready  to  grant. 

Not  that  he  feared  mobs  as  he  feared  governments.  He 
regarded  them  with  an  aristocrat's  scorn.  The  only  mob 
that  almost  won  his  tolerance  was  that  which  celebrated  the 
acquittal  of  Admiral  Keppel  in  1779.  It  was  of  the  mob  at 
this  time  that  he  wrote  to  the  Countess  of  Ossory :  "  They 
were,  as  George  Montagu  said  of  our  earthquakes,  so  tame 
you  might  }iave  stroked  them."  When  near  the  end  of  his 
life  the  September  massacres  broke  out  in  Paris,  his  mob- 
hatred  revived  again,  and  he  denounced  the  French  with 
the  hysterical  violence  with  which  many  people  to-day  de- 
nounce the  Bolshevists.  He  called  them  "  inferno-human 
beings,"  "  that  atrocious  and  detestable  nation,"  and  de- 
clared that  "  France  must  be  abhorred  to  latest  posterity." 
His  letters  on  the  subject  to  "  Holy  Hannah,"  whatever  else 
may  be  said  against  them,  are  not  those  of  a  cold  and 
dilettante  gossip.  They  are  the  letters  of  the  same  excitable 
Horace  Walpole  who,  at  an  earlier  age,  when  a  row  had 
broken  out  between  the  manager  and  the  audience  in  Drury 
Lane  Theatre,  had  not  been  able  to  restrain  himself,  but 
had  cried  angrily,  from  his  box,  "  He  is  an  impudent 
rascal !  "  But  his  politics  never  got  beyond  an  angry  cry. 
His  conduct  in  Drury  Lane  was  characteristic  of  him  : 

The  whole  pit  huzzaed,  and  repeated  the  words.  Only  think  of  my 
being  a  popular  orator !  But  what  was  still  better,  while  my  shadow 
of  a  person  was  dilating  to  the  consistence  of  a  hero,  one  of  the  chief 
ringleaders  of  the  riot,  coming  under  the  box  where  I  sat,  and  pulling 
off  his  hat,  said,  "  Mr.  Walpole,  what  would  you  please  to  have  us 
do  next?  "  It  is  impossible  to  describe  to  you  the  confusion  into  which 
this  apostrophe  threw  me.  I  sank  down  into  the  box,  and  have  never 
since  ventured  to  set  my  foot  into  the  playhouse. 


64  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

There  you  have  the  fable  of  Walpole's  life.  He  always  in 
the  end  sank  down  into  his  box  or  clambered  back  to  his 
mantelpiece.  Other  men  might  save  the  situation.  As  for 
him,  he  had  to  look  after  his  squirrels  and  his  friends. 

This  means  no  more  than  that  he  was  not  a  statesman, 
but  an  artist.  He  was  a  connoisseur  of  great  actions,  not 
a  practicer  of  them.  At  Strawberry  Hill  he  could  at  least 
keep  himself  in  sufficient  health  with  the  aid  of  iced  water 
and  by  not  wearing  a  hat  when  out  of  doors  to  compose  the 
greatest  works  of  art  of  their  kind  that  have  appeared  in 
English.  Had  he  written  his  letters  for  money  we  should 
have  praised  him  as  one  of  the  busiest  and  most  devoted 
of  authors,  and  never  have  thought  of  blaming  him  for 
abstaining  from  statesmanship  as  he  did  from  wine.  Pos- 
sibly he  had  the  constitution  for  neither.  His  genius  was 
a  genius,  not  of  Westminster,  but  of  Strawberry  Hill.  It 
is  in  Strawberry  Hill  that  one  finally  prefers  to  see  him 
framed,  an  extraordinarily  likeable,  charming,  and  whim- 
sical figure.  He  himself  has  suggested  his  kingdom  en- 
trancingly  for  us  in  a  letter  describing  his  return  to  Straw- 
berry after  a  visit  to  Paris  in  1769: 

I  feel  myself  here  like  a  swan,  that  after  living  six  weeks  in  a  nasty 
pool  upon  a  common,  is  got  back  into  its  own  Thames.  I  do  nothing 
but  plume  and  clean  myself,  and  enjoy  the  verdure  and  silent  waves. 
Neatness  and  greenth  are  so  essential  in  my  opinion  to  the  country, 
that  in  France,  where  I  see  nothing  but  chalk  and  dirty  peasants,  I 
seem  in  a  terrestrial  purgatory  that  is  neither  town  or  country.  The 
face  of  England  is  so  beautiful,  that  I  do  not  believe  Tempe  or  Arcadia 
were  half  so  rural ;  for  both  lying  in  hot  climates,  must  have  wanted 
the  turf  of  our  lawns.  It  is  unfortunate  to  have  so  pastoral  a  taste, 
when  I  want  a  cane  more  than  a  crook.  We  are  absurd  creatures ; 
at  twenty  I  loved  nothing  but  London. 

Back  in  Strawberry  Hill,  he  is  the  Prince  Charming 
among  correspondents.  One  cannot  love  him  as  one  loves 
Charles  Lamb  and  men  of  a  deeper  and  more  imaginative 
tenderness.  But  how  incomparable  he  is  as  an  acquaint- 
ance! How  exquisite  a  specimen — hand-painted — for  the 
collector  of  the  choice  creatures  of  the  human  race! 


VI.— WILLIAM  COWPER 

COWPER  has  the  charm  of  littleness.  His  life  and  genius 
were  on  the  miniature  scale,  though  his  tragedy  was  a 
burden  for  Atlas.  He  left  several  pictures  of  himself  in  his 
letters,  all  of  which  make  one  see  him  as  a  veritable  Tom 
Thumb  among  Christians.  He  wrote,  he  tells  us,  at  Olney, 
in  "  a  summerhouse  not  much  bigger  than  a  sedan-chair." 
At  an  earlier  date,  when  he  was  living  at  Huntingdon,  he 
compared  himself  to  "  a  Thames  wherry  in  a  world  full  of 
tempest  and  commotion,"  and  congratulated  himself  on 
"  the  creek  I  have  put  into  and  the  snugness  it  affords  me." 
His  very  clothes  suggested  that  he  was  the  inhabitant  of  a 
plaything  world.  "  Green  and  buff,"  he  declared,  "  are 
colours  in  which  I  am  oftener  seen  than  in  any  others,  and 
are  become  almost  as  natural  to  me  as  a  parrot."  "  My 
thoughts,"  he  informed  the  Rev.  John  Newton,  "  are  clad 
in  a  sober  livery,  for  the  most  part  as  grave  as  that  of  a 
bishop's  servants  " ;  but  his  body  was  dressed  in  parrot's 
colours,  and  his  bald  head  was  bagged  or  in  a  white  cap. 
If  he  requested  one  of  his  friends  to  send  him  anything 
from  town,  it  was  usually  some  little  thing,  such  as  a 
"  genteelish  toothpick  case,"  a  handsome  stock-buckle,  a 
new  hat — "  not  a  round  slouch,  which  I  abhor,  but  a  smart 
well-cocked  fashionable  affair  " — or  a  cuckoo-clock.  He 
seems  to  have  shared  Wordsworth's  taste  for  the  last  of 
these.  Are  we  not  told  that  Wordsworth  died  as  his  fa- 
vourite cuckoo-clock  was  striking  noon?  Cowper  may 
almost  be  said,  so  far  as  his  tastes  and  travels  are  con- 
cerned, to  have  lived  in  a  cage.  He  never  ventured  outside 
England,  and  even  of  England  he  knew  only  a  few  of  the 
southern  counties.  "  I  have  lived  much  at  Southampton," 
he  boasted  at  the  age  of  sixty,  "have  slept  and  caught  a 
sore  throat  at  Lyndhurst,  and  have  swum  in  the  Bay  of 

65 


66  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

Weymouth."  That  was  his  grand  tour.  He  made  a 
journey  to  Eastham,  near  Chichester,  about  the  time  of  this 
boast,  and  confessed  that,  as  he  drove  with  Mrs.  Unwin 
over  the  downs  by  moonlight,  "  I  indeed  myself  was  a  little 
daunted  by  the  tremendous  height  of  the  Sussex  hills  in 
comparison  of  which  all  I  had  seen  elsewhere  are  dwarfs." 
He  went  on  a  visit  to  some  relations  on  the  coast  of  Norfolk 
a  few  years  later,  and,  writing  to  Lady  Hesketh,  lamented : 
"  I  shall  never  see  Weston  more.  I  have  been  tossed  like 
a  ball  into  a  far  country,  from  which  there  is  no  rebound 
for  me."  Who  but  the  little  recluse  of  a  little  world  could 
think  of  Norfolk  as  a  far  country  and  shake  with  alarm 
before  the  "tremendous  height  "of  the  Sussex  downs? 

"  We  are  strange  creatures,  my  little  friend,"  Cowper 
once  wrote  to  Christopher  Rowley;  "  everything  that  we  do 
is  in  reality  important,  though  half  that  we  do  seems  to  be 
push-pin."  Here  we  see  one  of  the  main  reasons  of  Cow- 
per's  eternal  attractiveness.  He  played  at  push-pin  during 
most  of  his  life,  but  he  did  so  in  full  consciousness  of  the 
background  of  doom.  He  trifled  because  he  knew,  if  he  did 
not  trifle,  he  would  go  mad  with  thinking  about  Heaven  and 
Hell.  He  sought  in  the  infinitesimal  a  cure  for  the  disease 
of  brooding  on  the  infinite.  His  distractions  were  those  not 
of  too  light,  but  of  too  grave,  a  mind.  If  he  picnicked  with 
the  ladies,  it  was  in  order  to  divert  his  thoughts  from  the 
wrath  to  come.  He  was  gay,  but  on  the  edge  of  the  precipice. 

I  do  not  mean  to  suggest  that  he  had  no  natural  inclina- 
tion to  trifling.  Even  in  the  days  when  he  was  studying  law 
in  the  Temple  he  dined  every  Thursday  with  six  of  his  old 
school-fellows  at  the  Nonsense  Club.  His  essays  in  Bonnell 
Thornton  and  Coleman's  paper,  The  Connoisseur,  written 
some  time  before  he  went  mad  and  tried  to  hang  himself  in 
a  garter,  lead  one  to  believe  that,  if  it  had  not  been  for  his 
breakdown,  he  might  have  equalled  or  surpassed  Addison 
as  a  master  of  light  prose.  He  was  something  of  the  tra- 
ditional idle  apprentice,  indeed,  during  his  first  years  in  a 
solicitor's  office,  as  we  gather  from  the  letter  in  which  he 
reminds  Lady  Hesketh  how  he  and  Thurlow  used  to  pass 


WILLIAM  COW  PER  67 

the  time  with  her  and  her  sister,  Theodora,  the  object  of 
his  fruitless  love.  "  There  was  I,  and  the  future  Lord 
Chancellor,"  he  wrote,  "  constantly  employed  from  morning 
to  night  in  giggling  and  making  giggle,  instead  of  studying 
the  law."  Such  was  his  life  till  the  first  attack  of  madness 
came  at  the  age  of  thirty-two.  He  had  already,  it  is  true, 
on  one  occasion,  felt  an  ominous  shock  as  a  schoolboy  at 
Westminster,  when  a  skull  thrown  up  by  a  gravedigger  at 
St.  Margaret's  rolled  towards  him  and  struck  him  on  the 
leg.  Again,  in  his  chambers  in  the  Middle  Temple,  he 
suffered  for  a  time  from  religious  melancholy,  which  he 
did  his  best  to  combat  with  the  aid  of  the  poems  of  George 
Herbert.  Even  at  the  age  of  twenty-three  he  told  Robert 
Lloyd  in  a  rhymed  epistle  that  he  "  addressed  the  muse," 
not  in  order  to  show  his  genius  or  his  wit, 

But  to  divert  a  fierce  banditti 
(Sworn  foe  to  everything  that's  witty) 
That,  in  a  black  infernal  train, 
Make  cruel  inroads  in  my  brain, 
And  daily  threaten  to  drive  thence 
My  little  garrison  of  sense. 

It  was  not  till  after  his  release  from  the  St.  Alban's  mad- 
house in  his  thirties,  however,  that  he  began  to  build  a  little 
new  world  of  pleasures  on  the  ruins  of  the  old.  He  now 
set  himself  of  necessity  to  the  task  of  creating  a  refuge 
within  sight  of  the  Cross,  where  he  could  live,  in  his 
brighter  moments,  a  sort  of  Epicurean  of  evangelical  piety. 
He  was  a  damned  soul  that  must  occupy  itself  at  all  costs 
and  not  damn  itself  still  deeper  in  the  process.  His  round 
of  recreation,  it  must  be  admitted,  was  for  the  most  part 
such  as  would  make  the  average  modern  pleasure-seeker 
quail  worse  than  any  inferno  of  miseries.  Only  a  nature  of 
peculiar  sweetness  could  charm  us  from  the  atmosphere  of 
endless  sermons  and  hymns  in  which  Cowper  learned  to  be 
happy  in  the  Un wins'  Huntingdon  home.  Breakfast,  he 
tells  us,  was  between  eight  and  nine.  Then,  "  till  eleven, 
we  read  either  the  Scripture,  or  the  sermons  of  some  faith- 
ful preacher  of  those  holy  mysteries."  Church  was  at 


68  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

eleven.  After  that  he  was  at  liberty  to  read,  walk,  ride,  or 
work  in  the  garden  till  the  three  o'clock  dinner.  Then  to 
the  garden,  "  where  with  Mrs.  Unwin  and  her  son  I  have 
generally  the  pleasure  of  religious  conversation  till  tea- 
time."  After  tea  came  a  four-mile  walk,  and  "  at  night  we 
read  and  converse,  as  before,  till  supper,  and  commonly 
finish  the  evening  either  with  hymns  or  a  sermon ;  and  last 
of  all  the  family  are  called  to  prayers."  In  those  days,  it 
may  be,  evangelical  religion  had  some  of  the  attractions  of 
a  new  discovery.  Theories  of  religion  were  probably  as 
exciting  a  theme  of  discussion  in  the  age  of  Wesley  as 
theories  of  art  and  literature  in  the  age  of  cubism  and  vers 
libre.  One  has  to  remember  this  in  order  to  be  able  to 
realize  that,  as  Cowper  said,  "  such  a  life  as  this  is  con- 
sistent with  the  utmost  cheerfulness."  He  unquestionably 
found  it  so,  and,  when  the  Rev.  Morley  Unwin  was  killed 
as  the  result  of  a  fall  from  his  horse,  Cowper  and  Mrs. 
Unwin  moved  to  Olney  in  order  to  enjoy  further  evan- 
gelical companionship  in  the  neighbourhood  of  the  Rev. 
John  Newton,  the  converted  slave-trader,  who  was  curate  in 
that  town.  At  Olney  Cowper  added  at  once  to  his  terrors 
of  Hell  and  to  his  amusements.  For  the  terrors,  Newton, 
who  seems  to  have  wielded  the  Gospel  as  fiercely  as  a  slaver's 
whip,  was  largely  responsible.  He  had  earned  a  reputation 
for  "  preaching  people  mad,"  and  Cowper,  tortured  with 
shyness,  was  even  subjected  to  the  ordeal  of  leading  in 
prayer  at  gatherings  of  the  faithful.  Newton,  however,  was 
a  man  of  tenderness,  humour,  and  literary  tastes,  as  well  as 
of  a  somewhat  savage  piety.  He  was  not  only  Cowper's 
tyrant,  but  Cowper's  nurse,  and,  in  setting  Cowper  to  write 
the  Olney  Hymns,  he  gave  a  powerful  impulse  to  a  talent 
hitherto  all  but  hidden.  At  the  same  time,  when,  as  a  result 
of  the  too  merciless  flagellation  of  his  parishioners  on  the 
occasion  of  some  Fifth  of  November  revels,  Newton  was 
attacked  by  a  mob  and  driven  out  of  Olney,  Cowper  un- 
doubtedly began  to  breathe  more  freely.  Even  under  the  eye 
of  Newton,  however,  Cowper  could  enjoy  his  small  pleas- 
ures, and  we  have  an  attractive  picture  of  him  feeding  his 


WILLIAM  COWPER  69 

eight  pair  of  tame  pigeons  every  morning  on  the  gravel 
walk  in  the  garden.  He  shared  with  Newton  his  amuse- 
ments as  well  as  his  miseries.  We  find  him  in  1780  writing 
to  the  departed  Newton  to  tell  him  of  his  recreations  as  an 
artist  and  gardener.  "  I  draw,"  he  said,  "  mountains,  val- 
leys, woods,  and  streams,  and  ducks,  and  dab-chicks."  He 
represents  himself  in  this  lively  letter  as  a  Christian  lover 
of  baubles,  rather  to  the  disadvantage  of  lovers  of  baubles 
who  are  not  Christians: 

I  delight  in  baubles,  and  know  them  to  be  so;  for  rested  in,  and 
viewed  without  a  reference  to  their  author,  what  is  the  earth — what 
are  the  planets — what  is  the  sun  itself  but  a  bauble?  Better  for  a 
man  never  to  have  seen  them,  or  to  see  them  with  the  eyes  of  a  brute, 
stupid  and  unconscious  of  what  he  beholds,  than  not  to  be  able  to 
say,  "  The  Maker  of  all  these  wonders  is  my  friend ! "  Their  eyes 
have  never  been  opened  to  see  that  they  are  trifles;  mine  have  been, 
and  will  be  till  they  are  closed  for  ever.  They  think  a  fine  estate,  a 
large  conservatory,  a  hothouse  rich  as  a  West  Indian  garden,  things 
of  consequence ;  visit  them  with  pleasure,  and  muse  upon  them  with 
ten  times  more.  I  am  pleased  with  a  frame  of  four  lights,  doubtful 
whether  the  few  pines  it  contains  will  ever  be  worth  a  farthing ;  amuse 
myself  with  a  greenhouse  which  Lord  Bute's  gardener  could  take 
upon  his  back,  and  walk  away  with;  and  when  I  have  paid  it  the 
accustomed  visit,  and  watered  it,  and  given  it  air,  I  say  to  myself : 
"This  is  not  mine,  it  is  a  plaything  lent  me  for  the  present;  I  must 
leave  it  soon." 

In  this  and  the  following  year  we  find  him  turning  his 
thoughts  more  and  more  frequently  to  writing  as  a  means 
of  forgetting  himself.  "  The  necessity  of  amusement,"  he 
wrote  to  Mrs.  Unwin's  clergyman  son,  "  makes  me  some- 
times write  verses;  it  made  me  a  carpenter,  a  birdcage 
maker,  a  gardener;  and  has  lately  taught  me  to  draw,  and 
to  draw  too  with  .  .  .  surprising  proficiency  in  the  art, 
considering  my  total  ignorance  of  it  two  months  ago."  His 
impulse  towards  writing  verses,  however,  was  an  impulse 
of  a  playful  fancy  rather  than  of  a  burning  imagination. 
"  I  have  no  more  right  to  the  name  of  poet,"  he  once  said, 
"  than  a  maker  of  mouse-traps  has  to  that  of  an  engineer. 
.  Such  a  talent  in  verse  as  mine  is  like  a  child's 


70  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

rattle — very  entertaining  to  the  trifler  that  uses  it,  and  very 
disagreeable  to  all  beside."  "  Alas,"  he  wrote  in  another 
letter,  "what  can  I  do  with  my  wit?  I  have  not  enough 
to  do  great  things  with,  and  these  little  things  are  so  fugi- 
tive that,  while  a  man  catches  at  the  subject,  he  is  only 
filling  his  hand  with  smoke.  I  must  do  with  it  as  I  do  with 
my  linnet ;  I  keep  him  for  the  most  part  in  a  cage,  but  now 
and  then  set  open  the  door,  that  he  may  whisk  about  the 
room  a  little,  and  then  shut  him  up  again."  It  may  be 
doubted  whether,  if  subjects  had  not  been  imposed  on  him 
from  without,  he  would  have  written  much  save  in  the  vein 
of  "  dear  Mat  Prior's  easy  jingle"  or  the  Latin  trifles  of 
Vincent  Bourne,  of  whom  Cowper  said :  "  He  can  speak  of 
a  magpie  or  a  cat  in  terms  so  exquisitely  appropriated  to 
the  character  he  draws  that  one  would  suppose  him  animated 
by  the  spirit  of  the  creature  he  describes." 

Cowper  was  not  to  be  allowed  to  write,  except  occasion- 
ally, on  magpies  and  cats.  Mrs.  Unwin,  who  took  a  serious 
view  of  the  poet's  art,  gave  him  as  a  subject  The  Progress 
of  Error,  and  is  thus  mainly  responsible  for  the  now  little- 
read  volume  of  moral  satires,  with  which  he  began  his 
career  as  a  poet  at  the  age  of  fifty  in  1782.  It  is  not  a  book 
that  can  be  read  with  unmixed,  or  even  with  much,  delight. 
It  seldom  rises  above  a  good  man's  rhetoric.  Cowper, 
instead  of  writing  about  himself  and  his  pets,  and  his 
cucumber-frames,  wrote  of  the  wicked  world  from  which 
he  had  retired,  and  the  vices  of  which  he  could  not  attack 
with  that  particularity  that  makes  satire  interesting.  The 
satires  are  not  exactly  dull,  but  they  are  lacking  in  force, 
either  of  wit  or  of  passion.  They  are  hardly  more  than  an 
expression  of  sentiment  and  opinion.  The  sentiments  are 
usually  sound — for  Cowper  was  an  honest  lover  of  liberty 
and  goodness — but  even  the  cause  of  liberty  is  not  likely 
to  gain  much  from  such  a  couplet  as : 

Man  made  for  kings !  those  optics  are  but  dim 
That  tell  you  so — say,  rather,  they  fof  him. 

Nor  will  the  manners  of  the  clergy  benefit  much  as  the 


WILLIAM  COWPER  71 

result  of  such  an  attack  on  the  "  pleasant-Sunday-after- 
noon "  kind  of  pastor  as  is  contained  in  the  lines : 

If  apostolic  gravity  be  free 
To  play  the  fool  on  Sundays,  why  not  we? 
If  he  the  tinkling  harpsichord  regards 
As  inoffensive,  what  offence  in  cards? 

These,  it  must  in  fairness  be  said,  are  not  examples  of  the 
best  in  the  moral  satires ;  but  the  latter  is  worth  quoting  as 
evidence  of  the  way  in  which  Cowper  tried  to  use  verse  as 
the  pulpit  of  a  rather  narrow  creed.  The  satires  are  hardly 
more  than  denominational  in  their  interest.  They  belong 
to  the  religious  fashion  of  their  time,  and  are  interesting 
to  us  now  only  as  the  old  clothes  of  eighteenth-century 
evangelicalism.  The  subject-matter  is  secular  as  well  as 
religious,  but  the  atmosphere  almost  always  remains  evan- 
gelical. The  Rev.  John  Newton  wrote  a  preface  for  the 
volume,  suggesting  this  and  claiming  that  the  author  "  aims 
to  communicate  his  own  perceptions  of  the  truth,  beauty 
and  influence  of  the  religion  of  the  Bible."  The  publisher 
became  so  alarmed  at  this  advertisement  of  the  piety  of  the 
book  that  he  succeeded  in  suppressing  it  in  the  first  edition. 
Cowper  himself  had  enough  worldly  wisdom  to  wish  to 
conceal  his  pious  intentions  from  the  first  glance  of  the 
reader,  and  for  this  reason  opened  the  book,  not  with  The 
Progress  of  Error,  but  with  the  more  attractively-named 
Table  Talk.  "  My  sole  drift  is  to  be  useful,"  he  told  a 
relation,  however.  "...  My  readers  will  hardly  have 
begun  to  laugh  before  they  will  be  called  upon  to  correct 
that  levity,  and  peruse  me  with  a  more  serious  air."  He 
informed  Newton  at  the  same  time :  "  Thinking  myself  in 
a  measure  obliged  to  tickle,  if  I  meant  to  please,  I  therefore 
affected  a  jocularity  I  did  not  feel."  He  also  told  Newton : 
"  I  am  merry  that  I  may  decoy  people  into  my  company." 
On  the  other  hand,  Cowper  did  not  write  John  Gilpin  which 
is  certainly  his  masterpiece,  in  the  mood  of  a  man  using  wit 
as  a  decoy.  He  wrote  it  because  it  irresistibly  demanded 
to  be  written.  "  I  wonder,"  he  once  wrote  to  Newton, 
"  that  a  sportive  thought  should  ever  knock  at  the  door  of 


72  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

my  intellects,  and  still  more  that  it  should  gain  admittance. 
It  is  as  if  harlequin  should  intrude  himself  into  the  gloomy 
chamber  where  a  corpse  is  deposited  in  state."  Harlequin, 
luckily  for  us,  took  hold  of  his  pen  in  John  Gilpin  and  in 
many  of  the  letters.  In  the  moral  satires,  harlequin  is 
dressed  in  a  sober  suit  and  sent  to  a  theological  seminary. 
One  cannot  but  feel  that  there  is  something  incongruous 
in  the  boast  of  a  wit  and  a  poet  that  he  had  "  found  occa- 
sion towards  the  close  of  my  last  poem,  called  Retirement, 
to  take  some  notice  of  the  modern  passion  for  seaside  enter- 
tainments, and  to  direct  the  means  by  which  they  might  be 
made  useful  as  well  as  agreeable."  This  might  serve  well 
enough  as  a  theme  for  a  "  letter  to  the  editor  "of  The  Bap- 
tist Eye-opener.  One  cannot  imagine,  however,  its  causing 
a  flutter  in  the  breast  of  even  the  meekest  of  the  nine 
muses. 

Cowper,  to  say  truth,  had  the  genius  not  of  a  poet  but  of 
a  letter- writer.  The  interest  of  his  verse  is  chiefly  historical. 
He  was  a  poet  of  the  transition  to  Wordsworth  and  the 
revolutionists,  and  was  a  mouthpiece  of  his  time.  But  he 
has  left  only  a  tiny  quantity  of  memorable  verse.  Lamb 
has  often  been  quoted  in  his  favour.  "  I  have,"  he  wrote 
to  Coleridge  in  1796,  "  been  reading  The  Task  with  fresh 
delight.  I  am  glad  you  love  Cowper.  I  could  forgive  a 
man  for  not  enjoying  Milton,  but  I  would  not  call  that  man 
my  friend  who  should  be  offended  with  the  '  divine  chit- 
chat of  Cowper.' '  Lamb,  it  should  be  remembered,  was  a 
youth  of  twenty-one  when  he  wrote  this,  and  Cowper's  verse 
had  still  the  attractions  of  early  blossoms  that  herald  the 
coming  of  spring.  There  is  little  in  The  Task  to  make  it 
worth  reading  to-day,  except  to  the  student  of  literary 
history.  Like  the  Olney  Hymns  and  the  moral  satires  it 
was  a  poem  written  to  order.  Lady  Austen,  the  vivacious 
widow  who  had  meanwhile  joined  the  Olney  group,  was 
anxious  that  Cowper  should  show  what  he  could  do  in  blank 
verse.  He  undertook  to  humour  her  if  she  would  give  him 
a  subject.  "  Oh,"  she  said,  "  you  can  never  be  in  want  of 
a  subject;  you  can  write  upon  any;  write  upon  this  sofa!  " 


WILLIAM  COWPER  73 

Cowper,  in  his  more  ambitious  verse,  seems  seldom  to  have 
written  under  the  compulsion  of  the  subject  as  the  great 
poets  do.  Even  the  noble  lines  On  the  Loss  of  the  Royal 
George  were  written,  as  he  confessed,  "  by  desire  of  Lady 
Austen,  who  wanted  words  to  the  March  in  Scipio"  For 
this  Lady  Austen  deserves  the  world's  thanks,  as  she  does 
for  cheering  him  up  in  his  low  spirits  with  the  story  of  John 
Gilpin.  He  did  not  write  John  Gilpin  by  request,  however. 
He  was  so  delighted  on  hearing  the  story  that  he  lay  awake 
half  the  night  laughing  at  it,  and  the  next  day  he  felt  com- 
pelled to  sit  down  and  write  it  out  as  a  ballad.  "  Strange  as 
it  may  seem,"  he  afterwards  said  of  it,  "  the  most  ludicrous 
lines  I  ever  wrote  have  been  written  in  the  saddest  mood, 
and  but  for  that  saddest  mood,  perhaps,  had  never  been 
written  at  all."  "  The  grinners  at  John  Gilpin"  he  said  in 
another  letter,  "  little  dream  what  the  author  sometimes 
suffers.  How  I  hated  myself  yesterday  for  having  ever 
wrote  it!"  It  was  the  publication  of  The  Task  and  John 
Gilpin  that  made  Cowper  famous.  It  is  not  The  Task  that 
keeps  him  famous  to-day.  There  is,  it  seems  to  me,  more 
of  the  divine  fire  in  any  half-dozen  of  his  good  letters  than 
there  is  in  the  entire  six  books  of  The  Task.  One  has  only 
to  read  the  argument  at  the  top  of  the  third  book,  called 
The  Garden,  in  order  to  see  in  what  a  dreary  didactic  spirit 
it  is  written.  Here  is  the  argument  in  full : 

Self-recollection  and  reproof — Address  to  domestic  happiness — Some 
account  of  myself — The  vanity  of  many  of  the  pursuits  which  are 
accounted  wise — Justification  of  my  censures — Divine  illumination 
necessary  to  the  most  expert  philosopher— The  question,  what  is  truth? 
answered  by  other  questions — Domestic  happiness  addressed  again — 
Few  lovers  of  the  country — My  tame  hare — Occupations  of  a  retired 
gentleman  in  the  garden — Pruning — Framing — Greenhouse — Sowing  of 
flower-seeds — The  country  preferable  to  the  town  even  in  the  winter- 
Reasons  why  it  is  deserted  at  that  season— Ruinous  effects  of  gaming 
and  of  expensive  improvement — Book  concludes  with  an  apostrophe  to 
the  metropolis. 

It  is  true  that,  in  the  intervals  of  addresses  to  domestic 
happiness  and  apostrophes  to  the  metropolis,  there  is  plenty 
of  room  here  for  Virgilian  verse  if  Cowper  had  had  the 


74  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

genius  for  it.  Unfortunately,  when  he  writes  about  his 
garden,  he  too  often  writes  about  it  as  prosaically  as  a 
contributor  to  a  gardening  paper.  His  description  of  the 
making  of  a  hot  frame  is  merely  a  blank- verse  paraphrase 
of  the  commonest  prose.  First,  he  tells  us : 

The  stable  yields  a  stercoraceous  heap, 
Impregnated  with  quick  fermenting  salts, 
And  potent  to  resist  the  freezing  blast ; 
For,  ere  the  beech  and  elm  have  cast  their  leaf, 
Deciduous,  when  now  November  dark 
Checks  vegetation  in  the  torpid  plant, 
Expos'd  to  his  cold  breath,  the  task  begins. 
Warily  therefore,  and  with  prudent  heed 
He  seeks  a  f avour'd  spot ;  that  where  he  builds 
Th'  agglomerated  pile  his  frame  may  front 
The  sun's  meridian  disk,  and  at  the  back 
Enjoy  close  shelter,  wall,  or  reeds,  or  hedge 
Impervious  to  the  wind. 

Having  further  prepared  the  ground : 

Th'  uplifted  frame,  compact  at  every  joint, 
And  overlaid  with  clear  translucent  glass, 
He  settles  next  upon  the  sloping  mount, 
Whose  sharp  declivity  shoots  off  secure 
From  the  dash'd  pane  the  deluge  as  it  falls. 

The  writing  of  blank  verse  puts  the  poet  to  the  severest  test, 
and  Cowper  does  not  survive  the  test.  Had  The  Task  been 
written  in  couplets  he  might  have  been  forced  to  sharpen 
his  wit  by  the  necessity  of  rhyme.  As  it  is,  he  is  merely 
ponderous — a  snail  of  imagination  labouring  under  a  heavy 
shell  of  eloquence.  In  the  fragment  called  Yardley  Oak  he 
undoubtedly  achieved  something  worthier  of  a  distant  dis- 
ciple of  Milton.  But  I  do  not  think  he  was  ever  sufficiently 
preoccupied  with  poetry  to  be  a  good  poet.  He  had  even 
ceased  to  read  poetry  by  the  time  he  began  in  earnest  to 
write  it.  "I  reckon  it,"  he  wrote  in  1781,  "among  my 
principal  advantages,  as  a  composer  of  verses,  that  I  have 
not  read  an  English  poet  these  thirteen  years,  and  but  one 
these  thirteen  years."  So  mild  was  his  interest  in  his 
contemporaries  that  he  had  never  heard  Collins's  name  till 


WILLIAM  COW  PER  75 

he  read  about  him  in  Johnson's  Lives  of  the  Poets.  Though 
descended  from  Donne — his  mother  was  Anne  Donne — he 
was  apparently  more  interested  in  Churchill  and  Beattie 
than  in  him.  His  one  great  poetical  master  in  English  was 
Milton,  Johnson's  disparagement  of  whom  he  resented  with 
amusing  vehemence.  He  was  probably  the  least  bookish 
poet  who  had  ever  had  a  classical  education.  He  described 
himself  in  a  letter  to  the  Rev.  Walter  Bagot,  in  his  later 
years,  as  "  a  poor  man  who  has  but  twenty  books  in  the 
world,  and  two  of  them  are  your  brother  Chester's."  The 
passages  I  have  quoted  give,  no  doubt,  an  exaggerated 
impression  of  Cowper's  indifference  to  literature.  His 
relish  for  such  books  as  he  enjoyed  is  proved  in  many  of 
his  letters.  But  he  was  incapable  of  such  enthusiasm  for 
the  great  things  in  literature  as  Keats  showed,  for  instance, 
in  his  sonnet  on  Chapman's  Homer.  Though  Cowper, 
disgusted  with  Pope,  took  the  extreme  step  of  translating 
Homer  into  English  verse,  he  enjoyed  even  Homer  only 
with  certain  evangelical  reservations.  "  I  should  not  have 
chosen  to  have  been  the  original  author  of  such  a  business," 
he  declared,  while  he  was  translating  the  nineteenth  book 
of  the  Iliad,  "  even  though  all  the  Nine  had  stood  at 
my  elbow.  Time  has  wonderful  effects.  We  admire  that 
in  an  ancient  for  which  we  should  send  a  modern  bard  to 
Bedlam."  It  is  hardly  to  be  wondered  at  that  his  translation 
of  Homer  has  not  survived,  while  his  delightful  translation 
of  Vincent  Bourne's  Jackdaw  has. 

Cowper's  poetry,  however,  is  to  be  praised,  if  for  nothing 
else,  because  it  played  so  great  a  part  in  giving  the  world  a 
letter-writer  of  genius.  It  brought  him  one  of  the  best  of 
his  correspondents,  his  cousin,  Lady  Hesketh,  and  it  gave 
various  other  people  a  reason  for  keeping  his  letters.  Had 
it  not  been  for  his  fame  as  a  poet  his  letters  might  never 
have  been  published,  and  we  should  have  missed  one  of 
the  most  exquisite  histories  of  small  beer  to  be  had  outside 
the  pages  of  Jane  Austen.  As  a  letter-writer  he  does  not,  I 
think,  stand  in  the  same  rank  as  Horace  Walpole  and 
Charles  Lamb.  He  has  less  wit  and  humour,  and  he  mirrors 


76  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

less  of  the  world.  His  letters,  however,  have  an  extra- 
ordinarily soothing  charm.  Cowper's  occupations  amuse 
one,  while  his  nature  delights  one.  His  letters,  like  Lamb's, 
have  a  soul  of  goodness — not  of  mere  virtue,  but  of  good- 
ness— and  we  know  from  his  biography  that  in  life  he 
endured  the  severest  test  to  which  a  good  nature  can  be 
subjected.  His  treatment  of  Mrs.  Unwin  in  the  imbecile 
despotism  of  her  old  age  was  as  fine  in  its  way  as  Lamb's 
treatment  of  his  sister.  Mrs.  Unwin,  who  had  supported 
Cowper  through  so  many  dark  and  suicidal  hours,  after- 
wards became  palsied  and  lost  her  mental  faculties.  "  Her 
character,"  as  Sir  James  Frazer  writes  in  the  introduction 
to  his  charming  selection  from  the  letters,*  "  underwent  a 
great  change,  and  she  who  for  years  had  found  all  her  happi- 
ness in  ministering  to  her  afflicted  friend,  and  seemed  to 
have  no  thought  but  for  his  welfare,  now  became  querulous 
and  exacting,  forgetful  of  him  and  mindful,  apparently, 
only  of  herself.  Unable  to  move  out  of  her  chair  without 
help,  or  to  walk  across  the  room  unless  supported  by  two 
people,  her  speech  at  times  almost  unintelligible,  she  de- 
prived him  of  all  his  wonted  exercises,  both  bodily  and 
mental,  as  she  did  not  choose  that  he  should  leave  her  for  a 
moment,  or  even  use  a  pen  or  a  book,  except  when  he  read 
to  her.  To  these  demands  he  responded  with  all  the  devo- 
tion of  gratitude  and  affection;  he  was  assiduous  in  his 
attentions  to  her,  but  the  strain  told  heavily  on  his 
strength."  To  know  all  this  does  not  modify  our  opinion 
of  Cowper's  letters,  except  is  so  far  as  it  strengthens  it.  It 
helps  us,  however,  to  explain  to  ourselves  why  we  love 
them.  We  love  them  because,  as  surely  as  the  writings  of 
Shakespeare  and  Lamb,  they  are  an  expression  of  that  sort 
of  heroic  gentleness  which  can  endure  the  fires  of  the  most 
devastating  tragedy.  Shakespeare  finally  revealed  the 
strong  sweetness  of  his  nature  in  The  Tempest.  Many 
people  are  inclined  to  over-estimate  The  Tempest  as  poetry 

*  Letters  of  William  Cowper.    Chosen  and  edited  by  J.  G.  Frazer. 
Two  vols.    Eversley  Series.    Macmillan.    12s.  net. 


WILLIAM  COWPER  77 

simply  because  it  gives  them  so  precious  a  clue  to  the 
character  of  his  genius,  and  makes  clear  once  more  that  the 
grand  source  and  material  of  poetry  is  the  infinite  tender- 
ness of  the  human  heart.  Cowper's  letters  are  a  tiny  thing 
beside  Shakespeare's  plays.  But  the  same  light  falls  on 
them.  They  have  an  eighteenth-century  restraint,  and 
freedom  from  emotionalism  and  gush.  But  behind  their 
chronicle  of  trifles,  their  small  fancies,  their  little  vanities, 
one  is  aware  of  an  intensely  loving  and  lovable  personality. 
Cowper's  poem,  To  Mary,  written  to  Mrs.  Unwin  in  the 
days  of  her  feebleness,  is,  to  my  mind,  made  commonplace 
by  the  odious  reiteration  of  "  my  Mary ! "  at  the  end  of 
every  verse.  Leave  the  "  my  Marys  "  out,  however,  and 
see  how  beautiful,  as  well  as  moving,  a  poem  it  becomes. 
Cowper  was  at  one  time  on  the  point  of  marrying  Mrs. 
Unwin,  when  an  attack  of  madness  prevented  him.  Later 
on  Lady  Austen  apparently  wished  to  marry  him.  He  had 
an  extraordinary  gift  for  commanding  the  affections  of 
those  of  both  sexes  who  knew  him.  His  friendship  with 
the  poet  Hayley,  then  a  rocket  fallen  to  earth,  towards  the 
close  of  his  life,  reveals  the  lovableness  of  both  men. 

If  we  love  Cowper,  then,  it  is  not  only  because  of  his 
little  world,  but  because  of  his  greatness  of  soul  that  stands 
in  contrast  to  it.  He  is  like  one  of  those  tiny  pools  among 
the  rocks,  left  behind  by  the  deep  waters  of  ocean  and  reflect- 
ing the  blue  height  of  the  sky.  His  most  trivial  actions  ac- 
quire a  pathos  from  what  we  know  of  the  De  Profundis  that 
is  behind  them.  When  we  read  of  the  Olney  household — 
"  our  snug  parlour,  one  lady  knitting,  the  other  netting, 
and  the  gentleman  winding  worsted  " — we  feel  that  this 
marionette-show  has  some  second  and  immortal  signifi- 
cance. On  another  day,  "  one  of  the  ladies  has  been  play- 
ing a  harpsichord,  while  I,  with  the  other,  have  been  play- 
ing at  battledore  and  shuttlecock."  It  is  a  game  of  cherubs, 
though  of  cherubs  slightly  unfeathered  as  a  result  of  be- 
longing to  the  pious  English  upper-middle  classes.  The 
poet,  inclined  to  be  fat,  whose  chief  occupation  in  winter 
is  "  to  walk  ten  times  in  a  day  from  the  fireside  to  his  cu- 


78  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

cumber  frame  and  back  again,"  is  busy  enough  on  a 
heavenly  errand.  With  his  pet  hares,  his  goldfinches,  his 
dog,  his  carpentry,  his  greenhouse — "  Is  not  our  green- 
house a  cabinet  of  perfumes?" — his  clergymen,  his  ladies, 
and  his  tasks,  he  is  not  only  constantly  amusing  himself, 
but  carrying  on  a  secret  battle,  with  all  the  terrors  of  Hell. 
He  is,  indeed,  a  pilgrim  who  struggles  out  of  one  slough  of 
despond  only  to  fall  waist-deep  into  another.  This  strange 
creature  who  passed  so  much  of  his  time  writing  such  things 
as  Verses  written  at  Bath  on  Finding  the  Heel  of  a  Shoe, 
Ode  to  Apollo  on  an  Ink-glass  almost  dried  in  the  Sun, 
Lines  sent  with  Two  Cockscombs  to  Miss  Green,  and  On 
the  Death  of  Mrs.  Throckmorton's  Bullfinch,  stumbled 
along  under  a  load  of  woe  and  repentance  as  terrible  as  any 
of  the  sorrows  that  we  read  of  in  the  great  tragedies.  The 
last  of  his  original  poems,  The  Castaway,  is  an  image  of 
his  utter  hopelessness.  As  he  lay  dying  in  1880  he  was 
asked  how  he  felt.  He  replied.  "  I  feel  unutterable 
despair."  To  face  damnation  with  the  sweet  unselfishness 
of  William  Cowper  is  a  rare  and  saintly  accomplishment. 
It  gives  him  a  place  in  the  company  of  the  beloved  authors 
with  men  of  far  greater  genius  than  himself — with  Shake- 
speare and  Lamb  and  Dickens. 

Sir  Arthur  Quiller-Couch  has,  in  one  of  his  essays, 
expressed  the  opinion  that  of  all  the  English  poets  "  the 
one  who,  but  for  a  stroke  of  madness,  would  have  become 
our  English  Horace  was  William  Cowper.  He  had  the 
wit,"  he  added,  "  with  the  underlying  moral  seriousness." 
As  for  the  wit,  I  doubt  it.  Cowper  had  not  the  wit  that 
inevitably  hardens  into  "  jewels  five  words  long."  Labori- 
ously as  he  sought  after  perfection  in  his  verse,  he  was 
never  a  master  of  the  Horatian  phrase.  Such  phrases  of 
his — and  there  are  not  many  of  them — as  have  passed  into 
the  common  speech  flash  neither  with  wit  nor  with  wisdom. 
Take  the  best-known  of  them : 

"  The  cups 
That  cheer  hut  not  inebriate;" 


WILLIAM  COW  PER  1\) 

"  God  made  the  country  and  man  made  the  town ;  " 

"  I  am  monarch  of  all  I  survey ;  " 

"  Regions  Caesar  never  knew ;  "  and 

"  England,  with  all  thy  faults,  I  love  thee  still !  " 

This  is  lead  for  gold.  Horace,  it  is  true,  must  be  judged  as 
something  more  than  an  inventor  of  golden  tags.  But  no 
man  can  hope  to  succeed  Horace  unless  his  lines  and  phrases 
are  of  the  kind  that  naturally  pass  into  golden  tags.  This, 
I  know,  is  a  matter  not  only  of  style  but  of  temper.  But  it 
is  in  temper  as  much  as  in  style  that  Cowper  differs  from 
Horace.  Horace  mixed  on  easy  terms  with  the  world.  He 
enjoyed  the  same  pleasures;  he  paid  his  respects  to  the  same 
duties.  He  was  a  man  of  the  world  above  all  other  poets. 
Cowper  was  in  comparison  a  man  of  the  parlour.  His 
sensibilities  would,  I  fancy,  have  driven  him  into  retreat, 
even  if  he  had  been  neither  mad  nor  pious.  He  was  the 
very  opposite  of  a  worldling.  He  was,  as  he  said  of  himself 
in  his  early  thirties,  "  of  a  very  singular  temper,  and  very 
unlike  all  the  men  that  I  have  ever  conversed  with."  While 
claiming  that  he  was  not  an  absolute  fool,  he  added :  "  If  I 
was  as  fit  for  the  next  world  as  I  am  unfit  for  this — and  God 
forbid  I  should  speak  it  in  vanity — I  would  not  change 
conditions  with  any  saint  in  Christendom."  Had  Horace 
lived  in  the  eighteenth  century  he  would  almost  certainly 
have  been  a  Deist.  Cowper  was  very  nearly  a  Methodist. 
The  difference,  indeed,  between  them  is  fundamental.  Hor- 
ace was  a  pig,  though  a  charming  one;  Cowper  was  a 
pigeon. 

This  being  so,  it  seems  to  me  a  mistake  to  regard  Cowper 
as  a  Horace  manque,  instead  of  being  content  with  his 
miraculous  achievement  as  a  letter-writer.  It  may  well  be 
that  his  sufferings,  so  far  from  destroying  his  real  genius, 
harrowed  and  fertilized  the  soil  in  which  it  grew.  He  un- 
questionably was  more  ambitious  for  his  verse  than  for  his 
prose.  He  wrote  his  letters  without  labour,  while  he  was 
never  weary  of  using  the  file  on  his  poems.  "  To  touch  and 
retouch,"  he  once  wrote  to  the  Rev.  William  Unwin,  "  is, 


80  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

though  some  writers  boast  of  negligence,  and  others  would 
be  ashamed  to  show  their  foul  copies,  the  secret  of  almost 
all  good  writing,  especially  in  verse.  I  am  never  weary  of 
it  myself."  Even  if  we  count  him  only  a  middling  poet, 
however,  this  does  not  mean  that  all  his  fastidiousness  of 
composition  was  wasted.  He  acquired  in  the  workshop  of 
verse  the  style  that  stood  him  in  such  good  stead  in  the  field 
of  familiar  prose.  It  is  because  of  this  hard-won  ease  of 
style  that  readers  of  English  will  never  grow  weary  of  that 
epistolary  autobiography  in  which  he  recounts  his  maniacal 
fear  that  his  food  has  been  poisoned;  his  open-eyed  wonder 
at  balloons;  the  story  of  his  mouse;  the  cure  of  the  dis- 
tention  of  his  stomach  by  Lady  Hesketh's  gingerbread;  the 
pulling  out  of  a  tooth  at  the  dinner-table  unperceived  by 
the  other  guests;  his  desire  to  thrash  Dr.  Johnson  till  his 
pension  jingled  in  his  pocket;  and  the  mildly  fascinated 
tastes  to  which  he  confesses  in  such  a  paragraph  as : 

I  know  no  beast  in  England  whose  voice  I  do  not  account  musical 
save  and  except  always  the  braying  of  an  ass.  The  notes  of  all  our 
birds  and  fowls  please  me  without  one  exception.  I  should  not  indeed 
think  of  keeping  a  goose  in  a  cage,  that  I  might  hang  him  up  in  the 
parlour  for  the  sake  of  his  melody,  but  a  goose  upon  a  common,  or 
in  a  farm-yard,  is  no  bad  performer. 

Here  he  is  no  missfire  rival  of  Horace  or  Milton  or  Prior,  or 
any  of  the  other  poets.  Here  he  has  arrived  at  the  perfection 
for  which  he  was  born.  How  much  better  he  was  fitted  to 
be  a  letter-writer  than  a  poet  may  be  seen  by  anyone  who 
compares  his  treatment  of  the  same  incidents  in  verse  and 
in  prose.  There  is,  for  instance,  that  charming  letter  about 
the  escaped  goldfinch,  which  is  not  spoiled  for  us  even 
though  we  may  take  Blake's  view  of  caged  birds : 

I  have  two  goldfinches,  which  in  the  summer  occupy  the  green- 
house. A  few  days  since,  being  employed  in  cleaning  out  their  cages, 
I  placed  that  which  I  had  in  hand  upon  the  table,  while  the  other 
hung  against  the  wall;  the  windows  and  the  doors  stood  wide  open. 
I  went  to  fill  the  fountain  at  the  pump,  and  on  my  return  was  not 
a  little  surprised  to  find  a  goldfinch  sitting  on  the  top  of  the  cage  I 
had  been  cleaning,  and  singing  to  and  kissing  the  goldfinch  within. 


WILLIAM  COW  PER  81 

I  approached  him,  and  he  discovered  no  fear;  still  nearer,  and  he 
discovered  none.  I  advanced  my  hand  towards  him,  and  he  took  no 
notice  of  it.  I  seized  him,  and  supposed  I  had  caught  a  new  bird, 
but  casting  my  eye  upon  the  other  cage  perceived  my  mistake.  Its 
inhabitant,  during  my  absence,  had  contrived  to  find  an  opening,  where 
the  wire  had  been  a  little  bent,  and  made  no  other  use  of  the  escape 
it  afforded  him,  than  to  salute  his  friend,  and  to  converse  with  him 
more  intimately  than  he  had  done  before.  I  returned  him  to  his 
proper  mansion,  but  in  vain.  In  less  than  a  minute  he  had  thrust  his 
little  person  through  the  aperture  again,  and  again  perched  upon 
his  neighbour's  cage,  kissing  him,  as  at  the  first,  and  singing,  as  if 
transported  with  the  fortunate  adventure.  I  could  not  but  respect 
such  friendship,  as  for  the  sake  of  its  gratification  had  twice  declined 
an  opportunity  to  be  free,  and  consenting  to  their  union,  resolved  that 
for  the  future  one  cage  should  hold  them  both.  I  am  glad  of  such 
incidents ;  for  at  a  pinch,  and  when  I  need  entertainment,  the  versifica- 
tion of  them  serves  to  divert  me.  .  .  . 

Cowper's  "  versification  "  of  the  incident  is  vapid  com- 
pared to  this.  The  incident  of  the  viper  and  the  kittens 
again,  which  he  "  versified  "  in  The  Colubriad,  is  chronicled 
far  more  charmingly  in  the  letters.  His  quiet  prose  gave 
him  a  vehicle  for  that  intimacy  of  the  heart  and  fancy  which 
was  the  deepest  need  of  his  nature.  He  made  a  full  con- 
fession of  himself  only  to  his  friends.  In  one  of  his  letters 
he  compares  himself,  as  he  rises  in  the  morning  to  "an 
infernal  frog  out  of  Acheron,  covered  with  the  ooze  and 
mud  of  melancholy."  In  his  most  ambitious  verse  he  is  a 
frog  trying  to  blow  himself  out  into  a  bull.  It  is  the  frog 
in  him,  not  the  intended  bull,  that  makes  friends  with  us 
to-day. 


VII.— A  NOTE  ON  ELIZABETHAN  PLAYS 

VOLTAIRE'S  criticism  of  Shakespeare  as  rude  and  barbarous 
has  only  one  fault.  It  does  not  fit  Shakespeare.  Shake- 
speare, however,  is  the  single  dramatist  of  his  age  to  whom 
it  is  not  in  a  measure  applicable.  "  He  was  a  savage,"  said 
Voltaire,  "  who  had  imagination.  He  has  written  many 
happy  lines;  but  his  pieces  can  please  only  in  London  and 
in  Canada."  Had  this  been  said  of  Marlowe,  or  Chapman, 
or  Jonson  (despite  his  learning),  or  Cyril  Tourneur,  one 
might  differ,  but  one  would  admit  that  perhaps  there  was 
something  in  it.  Again,  Voltaire's  boast  that  he  had  been 
the  first  to  show  the  French  "  some  pearls  which  I  had 
found "  in  the  "  enormous  dunghill "  of  Shakespeare's 
plays  was  the  sort  of  thing  that  might  reasonably  have  been 
said  by  an  anthologist  who  had  made  selections  from 
Dekker  or  Beaumont  and  Fletcher  or  any  dramatist  writing 
under  Elizabeth  and  James  except  William  Shakespeare. 
One  reads  the  average  Elizabethan  play  in  the  certainty 
that  the  pearls  will  be  few  and  the  rubbish-heap  practically 
five  acts  high.  There  are,  perhaps,  a  dozen  Elizabethan 
plays  apart  from  Shakespeare's  that  are  as  great  as  his 
third-best  work.  But  there  are  no  Hamlets  or  Lears  among 
them.  There  are  no  Midsummer  Night's  Dreams.  There 
is  not  even  a  Winter's  Tale. 

If  Lamb,  then,  had  boasted  about  what  he  had  done  for 
the  Elizabethans  in  general  in  the  terms  used  by  Voltaire 
concerning  himself  and  Shakespeare  his  claim  would  have 
been  just.  Lamb,  however,  was  free  from  Voltaire's  vanity. 
He  did  not  feel  that  he  was  shedding  lustre  on  the  Eliza- 
bethans as  a  patron:  he  regarded  himself  as  a  follower. 
Voltaire  was  infuriated  by  the  suggestion  that  Shakespeare 
wrote  better  than  himself;  Lamb  probably  looked  on  even 
Cyril  Tourneur  as  his  superior.  Lamb  was  in  this  as  wide 

82 


A  NOTE  ON  ELIZABETHAN  PLAYS  83 

of  the  mark  as  Voltaire  had  been.  His  reverent  praise  has 
made  famous  among  virgins  and  boys  many  an  old 
dramatist  who  but  for  him  would  long  ago  have  been 
thrown  to  the  antiquaries,  and  have  deserved  it.  Everyone 
goes  to  the  Elizabethans  at  some  time  or  another  in  the  hope 
of  coming  on  a  long  succession  of  sleeping  beauties.  The 
average  man  retires  disappointed  from  the  quest.  He  would 
have  to  be  unusually  open  to  suggestion  not  to  be  disap- 
pointed at  the  first  reading  of  most  of  the  plays.  Many  a 
man  can  read  the  Elizabethans  with  Charles  Lamb's  en- 
thusiasm, however,  who  never  could  have  read  them  with 
his  own. 

One  day,  when  Swinburne  was  looking  over  Mr.  Gosse's 
books,  he  took  down  Lamb's  Specimens  of  the  English 
Dramatic  Poets,  and,  turning  to  Mr.  Gosse,  said,  "  That 
book  taught  me  more  than  any  other  book  in  the  world — 
that  and  the  Bible."  Swinburne  was  a  notorious  borrower 
of  other  men's  enthusiasms.  He  borrowed  republicanism 
from  Landor  and  Mazzini,  the  Devil  from  Baudelaire,  and 
the  Elizabethans  from  Lamb.  He  had  not,  as  Lamb  had, 
Elizabethan  rblood  in  his  veins.  Lamb  had  the  Elizabethan 
love  of  phrases  that  have  cost  a  voyage  of  fancies  dis- 
covered in  a  cave.  Swinburne  had  none  of  this  rich  taste 
in  speech.  He  used  words  riotously,  but  he  did  not  use 
great  words  riotously.  He  was  excitedly  extravagant  where 
Lamb  was  carefully  extravagant.  He  often  seemed  to  be 
bent  chiefly  on  making  a  beautiful  noise.  Nor  was  this  the 
only  point  on  which  he  was  opposed  to  Lamb  and  the 
Elizabethans.  He  differed  fundamentally  from  them  in  his 
attitude  to  the  spectacle  of  life.  His  mood  was  the  mood 
not  of  a  spectator  but  of  a  revivalist.  He  lectured  his 
generation  on  the  deadly  virtues.  He  was  far  more  anxious 
to  shock  the  drawing-room  than  to  entertain  the  bar-parlour. 
Lamb  himself  was  little  enough  of  a  formal  Puritan.  He 
felt  that  the  wings  both  of  the  virtues  and  the  vices  had 
been  clipped  by  the  descendants  of  the  Puritans.  He  did 
not  scold,  however,  but  retired  into  the  spectacle  of  another 
century.  He  wandered  among  old  plays  like  an  exile 


84  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

returning  with  devouring  eyes  to  a  dusty  ancestral  castle. 
Swinburne,  for  his  part,  cared  little  for  seeing  things  and 
much  for  saying  things.  As  a  result,  a  great  deal  of  his 
verse — and  still  more  of  his  prose — has  the  heat  of  an  argu- 
ment rather  than  the  warmth  of  life. 

His  posthumous  book  on  the  Elizabethans  is  liveliest 
when  it  is  most  argumentative.  Swinburne  is  less  amusing 
when  he  is  exalting  the  Elizabethans  than  when  he  is 
cleaving  the  skull  of  a  pet  aversion.  His  style  is  an 
admirable  one  for  faction-fighting,  but  is  less  suitable  for 
intimate  conversation.  He  writes  in  superlatives  that  give 
one  the  impression  that  he  is  furious  about  something  or 
other  even  when  he  is  being  fairly  sensible.  His  criticism 
has  thus  an  air  of  being  much  more  insane  than  it  is.  His 
estimates  of  Chapman  and  Richard  Brome  are  both  far 
more  moderate  and  reasonable  than  appears  at  first  reading. 
He  out-Lambs  Lamb  in  his  appreciativeness ;  but  one  can- 
not accuse  him  of  injudicious  excess  when  he  says  of 
Brome : 

Were  he  now  alive,  he  would  be  a  brilliant  and  able  competitor  in 
their  own  field  of  work  and  study  with  such  admirable  writers  as 
Mrs.  Oliphant  and  Mr.  Norris. 

Brome,  I  think,  is  better  than  this  implies.  Swinburne  is 
not  going  many  miles  too  far  when  he  calls  The  Antipodes 
"  one  of  the  most  fanciful  and  delightful  farces  in  the 
world."  It  is  a  piece  of  poetic  low  comedy  that  will  almost 
certainly  entertain  and  delight  any  reader  who  goes  to  it 
expecting  to  be  bored. 

It  is  safe  to  say  of  most  of  the  Elizabethan  dramatists 
that  the  average  reader  must  fulfil  one  of  two  conditions  if 
he  is  not  to  be  disappointed  in  them.  He  must  not  expect 
to  find  them  giants  on  the  Shakespeare  scale.  Better  still, 
he  must  turn  to  them  as  to  a  continent  or  age  of  poetry 
rather  than  for  the  genius  of  separate  plays.  Of  most  of 
them  it  may  be  said  that  their  age  is  greater  than  they — 
that  they  are  glorified  by  their  period  rather  than  glorify  it. 
They  are  figures  in  a  golden  and  teeming  landscape,  and 


A  NOTE  ON  ELIZABETHAN  PLAYS  85 

one  moves  among  them  under  the  spell  of  their  noble 
circumstances. 

They  are  less  great  individually  than  in  the  mass.  If 
they  are  giants,  few  of  them  are  giants  who  can  stand  on 
their  own  legs.  They  prop  one  another  up.  There  are  not 
more  than  a  dozen  Elizabethan  plays  that  are  individually 
worth  a  superlative,  as  a  novel  by  Jane  Austen  or  a  sonnet 
by  Wordsworth  is.  The  Elizabethan  lyrics  are  an  im- 
mensely more  precious  possession  than  the  plays.  The  best 
of  the  dramatists,  indeed,  were  poets  by  destiny  and  drama- 
tists by  accident.  It  is  conceivable  that  the  greatest  of  them 
apart  from  Shakespeare — Marlowe  and  Jonson  and  Webster 
and  Dekker — might  have  been  greater  writers  if  the  English 
theatre  had  never  existed.  Shakespeare  alone  was  as  great 
in  the  theatre  as  in  poetry.  Jonson,  perhaps,  also  came 
near  being  so.  The  Alchemist  is  a  brilliant  heavy-weight 
comedy,  which  one  would  hardly  sacrifice  even  for  another 
of  Jonson's  songs.  As  for  Dekker,  on  the  other  hand, 
much  as  one  admires  the  excellent  style  in  which  he  writes 
as  well  as  the  fine  poetry  and  comedy  which  survive  in  his 
dialogue,  his  Siveet  Content  is  worth  all  the  purely  dramatic 
work  he  ever  wrote. 

One  thing  that  differentiates  the  other  Elizabethan  and 
Jacobean  dramatists  from  Shakespeare  is  their  comparative 
indifference  to  human  nature.  There  is  too  much  mechanical 
malice  in  their  tragedies  and  too  little  of  the  passion  that 
every  man  recognizes  in  his  own  breast.  Even  so  good  a 
play  as  The  Duchess  of  Malfi  is  marred  by  inadequacy  of 
motive  on  the  part  of  the  duchess's  persecutors.  Similarly, 
in  Chapman's  Bussy  d'  Ambois,  the  villains  are  simply  a 
dramatist's  infernal  machines.  Shakespeare's  own  plays 
contain  numerous  examples  of  inadequacy  of  motive — the 
casting-off  of  Cordelia  by  her  father,  for  instance,  and  in 
part  the  revenge  of  lago.  But,  if  we  accept  the  first  act  of 
King  Lear  as  an  incident  in  a  fairy-tale,  the  motive  of  the 
passion  of  Lear  in  the  other  four  acts  is  not  only  adequate 
but  overwhelming.  Othello  breaks  free  from  mechanism  of 
plot  in  a  similar  way.  Shakespeare  as  a  writer  of  the  fiction 


86  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

of  human  nature  was  as  supreme  among  his  contemporaries 
as  was  Gulliver  among  the  Lilliputians. 

Having  recognized  this,  one  can  begin  to  enjoy  the 
Elizabethan  dramatists  again.  Lamb  and  Coleridge  and 
Hazlitt  found  them  lying  flat,  and  it  was  natural  that 
they  should  raise  them  up  and  set  them  affectionately  on 
pedestals  for  the  gaze  of  a  too  indifferent  world.  The 
modern  reader,  accustomed  to  seeing  them  on  their 
pedestals,  however,  is  tempted  to  wish  that  they  were  lying 
flat  again.  Most  of  the  Elizabethans  deserve  neither  fate. 
They  should  be  left  neither  flat  nor  standing  on  separate 
pedestals,  but  leaning  at  an  angle  of  about  forty-five 
degrees — resting  against  the  base  of  Shakespeare's  colossal 
statue. 

Had  Swinburne  written  of  them  all  as  imaginatively  as 
he  has  written  of  Chapman,  his  interpretations,  excessive 
though  they  often  are,  would  have  added  to  one's  enjoy- 
ment of  them.  His  Chapman  gives  us  a  portrait  of  a 
character.  Several  of  the  chapters  in  Contemporaries  of 
Shakespeare,  however,  are,  apart  from  the  strong  language, 
little  more  inspiring  than  the  summaries  of  novels  and  plays 
in  a  school  history  of  literature.  Even  Mr.  Gosse  himself, 
if  I  remember  right,  in  his  Life  of  Swinburne,  described  one 
of  the  chapters  as  "unreadable."  The  book  as  a  whole  is 
not  that.  But  it  unquestionably  shows  us  some  of  the 
minor  Elizabethans  by  fog  rather  than  by  the  full  light 
of  day. 


VIII.— THE  OFFICE  OF  THE  POETS 

THERE  is — at  least,  there  seems  to  be — more  cant  talked 
about  poetry  just  now  than  at  any  previous  time.  Tartuffe 
is  to-day  not  a  priest  but  a  poet — or  a  critic.  Or,  perhaps, 
Tartuffe  is  too  lively  a  prototype  for  the  Curates  of  poetry 
who  swarm  in  the  world's  capitals  at  the  present  hour. 
There  is  a  tendency  in  the  followers  of  every  art  or  craft  to 
impose  it  on  the  world  as  a  mystery  of  which  the  vulgar  can 
know  nothing.  In  medicine,  as  in  bricklaying,  there  is  a 
powerful  trade  union  into  which  the  members  can  retire  as 
into  a  sanctuary  of  the  initiate.  In  the  same  way,  the 
theologians  took  possession  of  the  temple  of  religion  and 
refused  admittance  to  laymen,  except  as  a  meek  and  awe- 
struck audience.  This  largely  resulted  from  the  Pharisaic 
instinct  that  assumes  superiority  over  other  men.  Phari- 
saism is  simply  an  Imperialism  of  the  spirit — joyless  and 
domineering.  Religion  is  a  communion  of  immortal  souls. 
Pharisaism  is  a  denial  of  this  and  an  attempt  to  set  up  an 
oligarchy  of  superior  persons.  All  the  great  religious 
reformations  have  been  rebellions  on  the  part  of  the  im- 
mortal souls  against  the  superior  persons.  Religion,  the 
reformers  have  proclaimed,  is  the  common  possession  of 
mankind.  Christ  came  into  the  world  not  to  afford  a  career 
to  theological  pedants,  but  that  the  mass  of  mankind  might 
have  life  and  might  have  it  more  abundantly. 

Poetry  is  in  constant  danger  of  suffering  the  same  fate  as 
religion.  In  the  great  ages  of  poetry,  poetry  was  what  is 
called  a  popular  subject.  The  greatest  poets,  both  of  Greece 
and  of  England,  took  their  genius  to  that  extremely  popular 
institution,  the  theatre.  They  wrote  not  for  pedants  or  any 
exclusive  circle,  but  for  mankind.  They  were,  we  have 
reason  to  believe,  under  no  illusions  as  to  the  imperfections 
of  mankind.  But  it  was  the  best  audience  they  could  get, 

87 


88  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

and  represented  more  or  less  the  same  kind  of  world  that 
they  found  in  their  own  bosoms.  It  is  a  difficult  thing  to 
prove  that  the  ordinary  man  can  appreciate  poetry,  just  as 
it  is  a  difficult  thing  to  prove  that  the  ordinary  man  has  an 
immortal  soul.  But  the  great  poets,  like  the  great  saints, 
gave  him  the  benefit  of  the  doubt.  If  they  had  not,  we 
should  not  have  had  the  Greek  drama  or  Shakespeare. 

That  they  were  right  seems  probable  in  view  of  the 
excellence  of  the  poems  and  songs  that  survive  among  a 
peasantry  that  has  not  been  de-educated  in  the  schools.  If 
the  arts  were  not  a  natural  inheritance  of  simple  people, 
neither  the  Irish  love-songs  collected  by  Dr.  Douglas  Hyde 
nor  the  Irish  music  edited  by  Moore  could  have  survived. 
I  do  not  mean  to  suggest  that  any  art  can  be  kept  alive 
without  the  aid  of  such  specialists  as  the  poet,  the  singer, 
and  the  musician;  but  neither  can  it  be  kept  healthily  alive 
without  the  popular  audience.  Tolstoy's  use  of  the  unspoiled 
peasant  as  the  test  of  art  may  lead  to  absurdities,  if  carried 
too  far.  But  at  least  it  is  an  error  in  the  right  direction. 
It  is  an  affirmation  of  the  fact  that  every  man  is  potentially 
an  artist  just  as  Christianity  is  an  affirmation  of  the  fact 
that  every  man  is  potentially  a  saint.  It  is  also  an  affirma- 
tion of  the  fact  that  art,  like  religion,  makes  its  appeal  to 
feelings  which  are  shared  by  the  mass  of  men  rather  than 
the  feelings  which  are  the  exclusive  possession  of  the  few. 
Where  Tolstoy  made  his  chief  mistake  was  in  failing  to  see 
that  the  artistic  sense,  like  the  religious  sense,  is  something 
that,  so  far  from  being  born  perfect,  even  in  the  unspoiled 
peasant,  passes  though  stage  after  stage  of  labour  and 
experience  on  the  way  to  perfection.  Every  man  is  an  artist 
in  the  seed :  he  is  not  an  artist  in  the  flower.  He  may  pass 
all  his  life  without  ever  coming  to  flower.  The  great  artist, 
however,  appeals  to  a  universal  potentiality  of  beauty. 
Tolstoy's  most  astounding  paradox  came  to  nothing  more 
than  this — that  art  exists,  not  for  the  hundreds  of  people 
who  are  artists  in  name,  but  for  the  millions  of  people  who 
are  artists  in  embryo. 

At  the  same  time,  there  is  no  use  in  being  too  confident 


THE  OFFICE  OF  THE  POETS  89 

that  the  average  man  will  ever  be  a  poet,  even  in  the  sense 
of  being  a  reader  of  poetry.  All  that  one  can  ask  is  that  the 
doors  of  literature  shall  be  thrown  open  to  him,  as  the  doors 
of  religion  are  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  he  is  not  a  perfect 
saint.  The  histories  of  literature  and  religion,  it  seems 
likely,  both  go  back  to  a  time  in  which  men  expressed  their 
most  rapturous  emotions  in  dances.  In  time  the  inarticulate 
shouts  of  the  dancers — Scottish  dancers  still  utter  those 
shouts,  do  they  not? — gave  place  to  rhythmic  words.  It 
may  have  been  the  genius  of  a  single  dancer  that  first  broke 
into  speech,  but  his  genius  consisted  not  so  much  in  his 
separateness  from  the  others  as  in  his  power  to  express  what 
all  the  others  felt.  He  was  the  prophet  of  a  rapture  that  was 
theirs  as  much  as  his  own. 

Men  learned  to  speak  rhythmically,  however,  not  merely 
in  order  to  liberate  their  deepest  emotions,  but  in  order  to 
remember  things.  Poetry  has  a  double  origin  in  joy  and 
utility.  The  "  Thirty  days  hath  September  "  rhyme  of  the 
English  child  suggests  the  way  in  which  men  must  have 
turned  to  verse  in  prehistoric  times  as  a  preservative  of 
facts,  of  proverbial  wisdom,  of  legend  and  narrative.  Sir 
Henry  Newbolt,  I  gather  from  his  New  Study  of  English 
Poetry,  would  deny  the  name  of  poetry  to  all  verse  that  is 
not  descended  from  the  choric  dance.  In  my  opinion  it  is 
better  to  recognize  the  two  lines,  as  of  the  father  and  the 
mother,  in  the  pedigree  of  poetry.  We  find  abundant  traces 
of  them  not  only  in  Hesiod  and  Virgil,  but  in  Homer  and 
Chaucer.  The  utility  of  form  and  the  joy  of  form  have  in 
all  these  poets  become  inextricably  united.  The  objection  to 
most  of  the  "  free  verse  "  that  is  being  written  to-day  is  that 
in  form  it  is  neither  delightful  nor  memorable.  The  truth 
is,  the  memorableness  of  the  writings  of  a  man  of  genius 
becomes  a  part  of  their  delight.  If  Pope  is  a  delightful 
writer  it  is  not  merely  because  he  expressed  interesting 
opinions;  it  is  because  he  threw  most  of  the  energies  of  his 
being  into  the  task  of  making  them  memorable  and  gave 
them  a  heightened  vitality  by  giving  them  rhymes.  His 
satires  and  The  Rape  of  the  Lock  are,  no  doubt,  better 


90 


poetry  than  the  Essay  on  Man,  because  he  poured  into  them 
a  still  more  vivid  energy.  But  I  doubt  if  there  is  any  reason- 
able definition  of  poetry  which  would  exclude  even  Pope  the 
"  essayist "  from  the  circle  of  the  poets.  He  was  a  puny 
poet,  it  may  be,  but  poets  were  always,  as  they  are  to-day,  of 
all  shapes  and  sizes. 

Unfortunately,  "  poetry,"  like  "  religion,"  is  a  word  that 
we  are  almost  bound  to  use  in  several  senses.  Sometimes 
we  speak  of  "  poetry  "  in  contradistinction  to  prose :  some- 
times in  contradistinction  to  bad  poetry.  Similarly, 
"  religion  "  would  in  one  sense  include  the  Abode  of  Love 
as  opposed  to  rationalism,  and  in  another  sense  would 
exclude  the  Abode  of  Love  as  opposed  to  the  religion  of 
St.  James.  In  a  common-sense  classification,  it  seems  to 
me,  poetry  includes  every  kind  of  literature  written  in  verse 
or  in  rhythms  akin  to  verse.  Sir  Thomas  Browne  may  have 
been  more  poetic  than  Erasmus  Darwin,  but  in  his  best 
work  he  did  not  write  poetry.  Erasmus  Darwin  may  have 
been  more  prosaic  than  Sir  Thomas  Browne,  but  in  his  most 
famous  work  he  did  not  write  prose.  Sir  Henry  Newbolt 
will  not  permit  a  classification  of  this  kind.  For  him  poetry 
is  an  expression  of  intuitions — an  emotional  transfiguration 
of  life — while  prose  is  the  expression  of  a  scientific  fact  or  a 
judgment.  '  I  doubt  if  this  division  is  defensible.  Every- 
thing that  is  literature  is,  in  a  sense,  poetry  as  opposed  to 
science;  but  both  prose  and  poetry  contain  a  great  deal  of 
work  that  is  preponderantly  the  result  of  observation  and 
judgment,  as  well  as  a  great  deal  that  is  preponderantly 
imaginative.  Poetry  is  a  house  of  many  mansions.  It 
includes  fine  poetry  and  foolish  poetry,  noble  poetry  and 
base  poetry.  The  chief  duty  of  criticism  is  the  praise — the 
infectious  praise — of  the  greatest  poetry.  The  critic  has 
the  right  to  demand  not  only  a  transfiguration  of  life,  but  a 
noble  transfiguration  of  life.  Swinburne  transfigures  life  in 
Anactoria  no  less  than  Shakespeare  transfigures  it  in  King 
Lear.  But  Swinburne's  is  an  ignoble,  Shakespeare's  a 
noble  transfiguration.  Poetry  may  be  divine  or  devilish, 
just  as  religion  may  be.  Literary  criticism  is  so  timid  of 


THE  OFFICE  OF  THE  POETS  91 

being  accused  of  Puritanism  that  it  is  chary  of  admitting 
that  there  may  be  a  Heaven  and  a  Hell  of  poetic  genius  as 
well  as  of  religious  genius.  The  moralists  go  too  far  on  the 
other  side  and  are  tempted  to  judge  literature  by  its  morality 
rather  than  by  its  genius.  It  seems  more  reasonable  to 
conclude  that  it  is  possible  to  have  a  poet  of  genius  who  is 
nevertheless  a  false  poet,  just  as  it  is  possible  to  have  a 
prophet  of  genius  who  is  nevertheless  a  false  prophet.  The 
lover  of  literature  will  be  interested  in  them  all,  but  he  will 
not  finally  be  deceived  into  blindness  to  the  fact  that  the 
greatest  poets  are  spiritually  and  morally,  as  well  as 
aesthetically,  great.  If  Shakespeare  is  infinitely  the  greatest 
of  the  Elizabethans,  it  is  not  merely  because  he  is  imagina- 
tively the  greatest;  it  is  also  because  he  had  a  soul  incom- 
parably noble  and  generotis.  Sir  Henry  Newbolt  deals  in 
an  interesting  way  with  this  ennoblement  of  life  that  is  the 
mark  of  great  poetry.  He  does  not  demand  of  poetry  an 
orthodox  code  of  morals,  but  he  does  contend  that  great 
poetry  marches  along  the  path  that  leads  to  abundance  of 
life,  and  not  to  a  feeble  and  degenerate  egotism. 

The  greatest  value  of  his  book,  however,  lies  in  the  fact 
that  he  treats  poetry  as  a  natural  human  activity,  and  that 
he  sees  that  poetry  must  be  able  to  meet  the  challenge  to  its 
right  to  exist.  The  extreme  moralist  would  deny  that  it  had 
a  right  to  exist  unless  it  could  be  proved  to  make  men  more 
moral.  The  hedonist  is  content  if  it  only  gives  him  pleasure. 
The  greatest  poets,  however,  do  not  accept  the  point  of  view 
either  of  the  extreme  moralist  or  of  the  hedonist.  Poetry 
exists  for  the  purpose  of  delivering  us  neither  to  good  con- 
duct nor  to  pleasure.  It  exists  for  the  purpose  of  releasing 
the  human  spirit  to  sing,  like  a  lark,  above  this  scene  of 
wonder,  beauty  and  terror.  It  is  consonant  both  with  the 
world  of  good  conduct  and  the  world  of  pleasure,  but  its 
song  is  a  voice  and  an  enrichment  of  the  earth,  uttered  on 
wings  half-way  between  earth  and  heaven.  Sir  Henry 
Newbolt  suggests  that  the  reason  why  hymns  almost  always 
fail  as  poetry  is  that  the  writers  of  hymns  turn  their  eyes 
away  so  resolutely  from  the  earth  we  know  to  the  world  that 


92  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

is  only  a  formula.  Poetry,  in  his  view,  is  a  transfiguration 
of  life  heightened  by  the  home-sickness  of  the  spirit  from  a 
perfect  world.  But  it  must  always  use  the  life  we  live  as 
the  material  of  its  joyous  vision.  It  is  born  of  our  double 
attachment  to  Earth  and  to  Paradise.  There  is  no  formula 
for  absolute  beauty,  but  the  poet  can  praise  the  echo  and 
reflection  of  it  in  the  songs  of  the  birds  and  the  colours  of 
the  flowers.  It  is  open  to  question  whether 

There  is  a  fountain  filled  with  blood 
expresses  the  home-sickness  of  the  spirit  as  yearningly  as 

And  now  my  heart  with  pleasure  fills 
And  dances  with  the  daffodils. 

There  are  many  details  on  which  one  would  like  to  join 
issue  with  Sir  Henry  Newbolt,  but  his  main  contentions  are 
so  suggestive,  his  sympathies  so  catholic  and  generous,  that 
it  seems  hardly  worth  while  arguing  with  him  about  ques- 
tions of  scansion  or  of  the  relation  of  Blake  to  contemporary 
politics,  or  of  the  evil  of  anthologies.  His  book  is  the  reply 
of  a  capable  and  honest  man  of  letters  to  the  challenge 
uttered  to  poets  by  Keats  in  The  Fall  of  Hyperion,  where 
Moneta  demands: 

What  benfits  canst  thou,  or  all  thy  tribe 
To  the  great  world? 

and  declares: 

None  can  usurp  this  height  .   .   . 

But  those  to  whom  the  miseries  of  the  world 

Are  misery,  and  will  not  let  them  rest. 

Sir  Henry  Newbolt,  like  Sir  Sidney  Colvin,  no  doubt, 
would  hold  that  here  Keats  dismisses  too  slightingly  his 
own  best  work.  But  how  noble  is  Keats's  dissatisfaction 
with  himself!  It  is  such  noble  dissatisfaction  as  this  that 
distinguishes  the  great  poets  from  the  amateurs.  Poetry 
and  religion — the  impulse  is  very  much  the  same.  The  rest 
is  but  a  parlour-game. 


IX.— EDWARD  YOUNG  AS  CRITIC 

So  little  is  Edward  Young  read  in  these  days  that  we 
have  almost  forgotten  how  wide  was  his  influence  in  the 
eighteenth  century.  It  was  not  merely  that  he  was  popular 
in  England,  where  his  satires,  The  Love  of  Fame,  the 
Universal  Passion,  are  said  to  have  made  him  £3,000.  He 
was  also  a  power  on  the  Continent.  His  Night  Thoughts 
was  translated  not  only  into  all  the  major  languages,  but 
into  Portuguese,  Swedish  and  Magyar.  It  was  adopted  as 
one  of  the  heralds  of  the  romantic  movement  in  France. 
Even  his  Conjectures  on  Original  Composition,  written  in 
1759  in  the  form  of  a  letter  to  Samuel  Richardson,  earned 
in  foreign  countries  a  fame  that  has  lasted  till  our  own  day. 
A  new  edition  of  the  German  translation  was  published  at 
Bonn  so  recently  as  1910.  In  England  there  is  no  famous 
author  more  assiduously  neglected.  Not  so  much  as  a  line 
is  quoted  from  him  in  The  Oxford  Book  of  English  Verse. 
I  recently  turned  up  a  fairly  full  anthology  of  eighteenth- 
century  verse  only  to  find  that  though  it  has  room  for  Mallet 
and  Ambrose  Phillips  and  Picken,  Young  has  not  been 
allowed  to  contribute  a  purple  patch  even  five  lines  long.  I 
look  round  my  own  shelves,  and  they  tell  the  same  story. 
Small  enough  poets  stand  there  in  shivering  neglect.  Aken- 
side,  Churchill  and  Parnell  have  all  been  thought  worth 
keeping.  But  not  on  the  coldest,  topmost  shelf  has  space 
been  found  for  Young.  He  scarcely  survives  even  in 
popular  quotations.  The  copy-books  have  perpetuated  one 
line: 

Procrastination  is  the  thief  of  time. 

Apart  from  that,  Night  Thoughts  have  been  swallowed  up 
in  an  eternal  night. 

And  certainly  a  study  of  the  titles  of  his  works  will  not 
encourage  the  average  reader  to  go  to  him  in  search  of 

93 


94  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

treasures  of  the  imagination.  At  the  age  of  thirty,  in  1713, 
he  wrote  a  Poem  on  the  Last  Day,  which  he  dedicated  to 
Queen  A'nne.  In  the  following  year  he  wrote  The  Force  of 
Religion,  or  Vanquish'd  Love,  a  poem  about  Lady  Jane 
Grey,  which  he  dedicated  to  the  Countess  of  Salisbury.  And 
no  sooner  was  Queen  Anne  dead  than  he  made  haste  to 
salute  the  rising  sun  in  an  epistle  On  the  Late  Queen's 
Death  and  His  Majesty's  Accession  to  the  Throne.  Passing 
over  a  number  of  years,  we  find  him,  in  1730,  publishing  a 
so-called  Pindaric  ode,  Imperium  Pelagi;  a  Naval  Lyric,  in 
the  preface  to  which  he  declares  with  characteristic  italics: 
"  Trade  is  a  very  noble  subject  in  itself;  more  proper  than 
any  for  an  Englishman ;  and  particularly  seasonable  at  this 
juncture."  Add  to  this  that  he  was  the  son  of  a  dean,  that 
he  married  the  daughter  of  an  earl,  and  that,  other  means  of 
advancement  having  failed,  he  became  a  clergyman  at  the 
age  of  between  forty  and  fifty,  and  the  suggested  portrait  is 
that  of  a  prudent  hanger-on  rather  than  a  fiery  man  of 
genius.  His  prudence  was  rewarded  with  a  pension  of 
£200  a  year,  a  Royal  Chaplaincy,  and  the  position  (after 
George  III.'s  accession)  of  Clerk  of  the  Closet  to  the 
Princess  Dowager.  In  the  opinion  of  Young  himself,  who 
lived  till  the  age  of  82,  the  reward  was  inadequate.  At  the 
age  of  79,  however,  he  had  conquered  his  disappointment 
to  a  sufficient  degree  to  write  a  poem  on  Resignation. 

Readers  who,  after  a  hasty  glance  at  his  biography,  are 
inclined  to  look  satirically  on  Young  as  a  time-server,  oily 
with  the  mediocrity  of  self-help,  will  have  a  pleasant  sur- 
prise if  they  read  his  Conjectures  on  Original  Composition 
for  the  first  time.  It  is  a  bold  and  masculine  essay  on 
literary  criticism,  written  in  a  style  of  quite  brilliant,  if  old- 
fashioned,  rhetoric.  Mrs.  Thrale  said  of  it :  "  In  the  Con- 
jectures upon  Original  Composition  .  .  .  we  shall  perhaps 
read  the  wittiest  piece  of  prose  our  whole  language  has  to 
boast;  yet  from  its  over-twinkling,  it  seems  too  little  gazed 
at  and  too  little  admired  perhaps."  This  is  an  exaggerated 
estimate.  Dr.  Johnson,  who  heard  Young  read  the  Con- 
jectures at  Richardson's  house,  said  that  "  he  was  surprised 


EDWARD  YOUNG  AS  CRITIC  95 

to  find  Young  receive  as  novelties  what  he  thought  very 
common  maxims."  If  one  tempers  Mrs.  Thrale's  enthu- 
siasms and  Dr.  Johnson's  scorn,  one  will  have  a  fairly  just 
idea  of  the  quality  of  Young's  book. 

It  is  simply  a  shot  fired  with  a  good  aim  in  the  eternal 
war  between  authority  and  liberty  in  literature.  This  is  a 
controversy  for  which,  were  men  wise,  there  would  be 
no  need.  We  require  in  literature  both  the  authority  of 
tradition  and  the  liberty  of  genius  to  such  new  conquests. 
Unfortunately,  we  cannot  agree  as  to  the  proportions  in 
which  each  of  them  is  required.  The  French  exaggerated 
the  importance  of  tradition,  and  so  gave  us  the  classical 
drama  of  Racine  and  Corneille.  Walt  Whitman  exag- 
gerated the  importance  of  liberty,  and  so  gave  us  Leaves  of 
Grass.  In  nearly  all  periods  of  literary  energy,  we  find 
writers  rushing  to  one  or  other  of  these  extremes.  Either 
they  declare  that  the  classics  are  perfect  and  cannot  be 
surpassed  but  only  imitated;  or,  like  the  Futurists,  they 
want  to  burn  the  classics  and  release  the  spirit  of  man  for 
new  adventures.  It  is  all  a  prolonged  duel  between  reaction 
and  revolution,  and  the  wise  man  of  genius  doing  his  best, 
like  a  Liberal,  to  bring  the  two  opponents  to  terms. 

Much  of  the  interest  of  Young's  book  is  due  to  the  fact 
that  in  an  age  of  reaction  he  came  out  on  the  revolutionary 
side.  There  was  seldom  a  time  at  which  the  classics  were 
more  slavishly  idolized  and  imitated.  Miss  Morley  quotes 
from  Pope  the  saying  that  "  all  that  is  left  us  is  to  recom- 
mend oui*  productions  by  the  imitation  of  the  ancients." 
Young  threw  all  his  eloquence  on  the  opposite  side.  He 
uttered  the  bold  paradox :  "  The  less  we  copy  the  renowned 
ancients,  we  shall  resemble  them  the  more."  "  Become  a 
noble  collateral,"  he  advised,  "  not  a  humble  descendant 
from  them.  Let  us  build  our  compositions  in  the  spirit,  and 
in  the  taste,  of  the  ancients,  but  not  with  their  materials. 
Thus  will  they  resemble  the  structures  of  Pericles  at  Athens, 
which  Plutarch  commends  for  having  had  an  air  of  antiquity 
as  soon  as  they  were  built."  He  refuses  to  believe  that  the 
moderns  are  necessarily  inferior  to  the  ancients.  If  they 


96  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

are  inferior,  it  is  because  they  plagiarize  from  the  ancients 
instead  of  emulating  them.  "If  ancients  and  moderns,"  he 
declares,  "  were  no  longer  considered  as  masters  and  pupils, 
but  as  hard-matched  rivals  for  renown,  then  moderns,  by 
the,  longevity  of  their  labours,  might  one  day  become 
ancients  themselves." 

He  deplores  the  fact  that  Pope  should  have  been  so 
content  to  indenture  his  genius  to  the  work  of  translation 
and  imitation: 

Though  we  stand  much  obliged  to  him  for  giving  us  an  Homer, 
yet  had  he  doubled  our  obligation  by  giving  us — a  Pope.  He  had  a 
strong  imagination  and  the  true  sublime?  That  granted,  we  might 
have  had  two  Homers  instead  of  one,  if  longer  had  been  his  life ;  for 
I  heard  the  dying  swan  talk  over  an  epic  plan  a  few  weeks  before  his 
decease. 

For  ourselves,  we  hold  that  Pope  showed  himself  to  be  as 
original  as  needs  be  in  his  epistles  to  Martha  Blount  and 
Dr.  Arbuthnot.  None  the  less,  the  general  philosophy  of 
Young's  remarks  is  sound  enough.  We  should  reverence 
tradition  in  literature,  but  not  superstitiously.  Too  much 
awe  of  the  old  masters  may  easily  scare  a  modern  into  hiding 
his  talent  in  a  napkin.  True,  we  are  not  in  much  danger 
of  servitude  to  tradition  in  literature  to-day.  We  no  longer 
imitate  the  ancients;  we  only  imitate  each  other.  On  the 
whole,  we  wish  there  was  rather  more  sense  of  the  tradition 
in  contemporary  writing.  The  danger  of  arbitrary  egoism  is 
quite  as  great  as  the  danger  of  classicism.  Luckily,  Young, 
in  stating  the  case  against  the  classicists,  has  at  the  same 
time  stated  perfectly  the  case  for  familiarity  with  the 
classics.  "  It  is,"  he  declares,  "  but  a  sort  of  noble  con- 
tagion, from  a  general  familiarity  with  their  writings,  and 
not  by  any  particular  sordid  theft,  that  we  can  be  the  better 
for  those  who  went  before  us."  However  we  may  deride  a 
servile  classicism,  we  should  always  set  out  assuming  the 
necessity  of  the  "  noble  contagion  for  every  man  of  let- 
ters." 

The  truth  is,  the  man  of  letters  must  in  some  way  recon- 
cile himself  to  the  paradox  that  he  is  at  once  the  acolyte  and 


EDWARD  YOUNG  AS  CRITIC  97 

the  rival  of  the  ancients.  Young  is  optimistic  enough  to 
believe  that  it  is  possible  to  surpass  them.  In  the  mechanic 
arts,  he  complains,  men  are  always  attempting  to  go  beyond 
their  predecessors;  in  the  liberal  arts,  they  merely  try  to 
follow  them.  The  analogy  between  the  continuous  advance 
of  science  and  a  possible  continuous  advance  in  literature 
is,  perhaps,  a  misleading'  one.  Professor  Gilbert  Murray, 
in  Religio  Grammatici,  bases  much  of  his  argument  on  a 
denial  that  such  an  analogy  should  be  drawn.  Literary 
genius  cannot  be  bequeathed  and  added  to  as  a  scientific 
discovery  can.  The  modern  poet  does  not  stand  on  Shake- 
speare's shoulders  as  the  modern  astronomer  stands  on 
Galileo's  shoulders.  Scientific  discovery  is  progressive. 
Literary  genius,  like  religious  genius,  is  a  miracle  less 
dependent  on  time.  None  the  less,  we  may  reasonably 
believe  that  literature,  like  science,  has  ever  new  worlds  to 
conquer — that,  even  if  ^schylus  and  Shakespeare, cannot  be 
surpassed,  names  as  great  as  theirs  may  one  day  be  added 
to  the  roll  of  literary  fame.  And  this  will  be  possible  only 
if  men  in  each  generation  are  determined,  in  the  words  of 
Goldsmith,  "bravely  to  shake  off  admiration,  and,  un- 
dazzled  by  the  splendour  of  another's  reputation,  to  chalk 
out  a  path  to  fame  for  themselves,  and  boldly  cultivate 
untried  experiment."  Goldsmith  wrote  these  words  in  The 
Bee  in  the  same  year  in  which  Young's  Conjectures  was 
published.  I  feel  tolerably  certain  that  he  wrote  them  as 
a  result  of  reading  Young's  work.  The  reaction  against 
traditionalism,  however,  was  gathering  general  force  by 
this  time,  and  the  desire  to  be  original  was  beginning  to 
oust  the  desire  to  copy.  Both  Young's  and  Goldsmith's 
essays  are  exceedingly  interesting  as  anticipations  of  the 
romantic  movement.  Young  was  a  true  romantic  when  he 
wrote  that  Nature  "  brings  us  into  the  world  all  Originals — 
no  two  faces,  no  two  minds,  are  just  alike;  but  all  bear 
evident  marks  of  separation  on  them.  Born  Originals,  how 
comes  it  to  pass  that  we  are  Copies  ?  "  Genius,  he  thinks, 
is  commoner  than  is  sometimes  supposed,  if  we  would  make 
use  of  it.  His  book  is  a  plea  for  giving  genius  its  head. 


98  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

He  wants  to  see  the  modern  writer,  instead  of  tilling  an 
exhausted  soil,  staking  out  a  claim  in  the  perfectly  virgin 
field  of  his  own  experience.  He  cannot  teach  you  to  be  a 
man  of  genius;  he  could  not  even  teach  himself  to  be  one.  - 
But  at  least  he  lays  down  many  of  the  right  rules  for  the 
use  of  genius.  His  book  marks  a  most  interesting  stage  in 
the  development  of  English  literary  criticism. 


X.— GRAY  AND  COLLINS 

THERE  seems  to  be  a  definite  connection  between  good 
writing  and  indolence.  The  men  whom  we  call  stylists 
have,  most  of  them,  been  idlers.  From  Horace  to  Robert 
Louis  Stevenson,  nearly  all  have  been  pigs  from  the  sty  of 
Epicurus.  They  have  not,  to  use  an  excellent  Anglo-Irish 
word,  "  industered "  like  insects  or  millionaires.  The 
greatest  men,  one  must  admit,  have  mostly  been  as  punctual 
at  their  labours  as  the  sun — as  fiery  and  inexhaustible. 
But,  then,  one  does  not  think  of  the  greatest  writers  as 
stylists.  They  are  so  much  more  than  that.  The  style  of 
Shakespeare  is  infinitely  more  marvellous  than  the  style 
of  Gray.  But  one  hardly  thinks  of  style  in  presence  of  the 
sea  or  a  range  of  mountains  or  in  reading  Shakespeare. 
His  munificent  and  gorgeous  genius  was  as  far  above  style 
as  the  statesmanship  of  Pericles  or  the  sanctity  of  Joan  of 
Arc  was  above  good  manners.  The  world  has  not  endorsed 
Ben  Jonson's  retort  to  those  who  commended  Shakespeare 
for  never  having  "  blotted  out "  a  line :  "  Would  he  had 
blotted  out  a  thousand !  "  We  feel  that  so  vast  a  genius  is 
beyond  the  perfection  of  control  we  look  for  in  a  stylist. 
There  may  be  badly-written  scenes  in  Shakespeare,  and 
pot-house  jokes,  and  wordy  hyperboles,  but  with  all  this 
there  are  enchanted  continents  left  in  him  which  we  may 
continue  to  explore  though  we  live  to  be  a  hundred. 

The  fact  that  the  noble  impatience  of  a  Shakespeare  is 
above  our  fault-finding,  however,  must  not  be  used  to  dis- 
parage the  lazy  patience  of  good  writing.  An  ^Eschylus  or 
a  Shakespeare,  a  Browning  or  a  Dickens,  conquers  us  with 
an  abundance  like  nature's.  He  feeds  us  out  of  a  horn  of 
plenty.  This,  unfortunately,  is  possible  only  to  writers  of 
the  first  order.  The  others,  when  they  attempt  profusion, 
become  fluent  rather  than  abundant,  facile  of  ink  rather 

99 


100  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

than  generous  of  golden  grain.  Who  does  not  agree  with 
Pope  that  Dryden,  though  not  Shakespeare,  would  have 
been  a  better  poet  if  he  had  learned: 

The  last  and  greatest  art— the  art  to  blot? 

Who  is  there  who  would  not  rather  have  written  a  single 
ode  of  Gray's  than  all  the  poetical  works  of  Southey?  If 
voluminousness  alone  made  a  man  a  great  writer,  we  should 
have  to  canonize  Lord  Lytton.  The  truth  is,  literary  genius 
has  no  rule  either  of  voluminousness  or  of  the  opposite. 
The  genius  of  one  writer  is  a  world  ever  moving.  The 
genius  of  another  is  a  garden  often  still.  The  greatest 
genius  is  undoubtedly  of  the  former  kind.  But  as  there  is 
hardly  enough  genius  of  this  kind  to  fill  a  wall,  much  less 
a  library,  we  may  well  encourage  the  lesser  writers  to 
cultivate  their  gardens,  and,  in  the  absence  of  the  wilder 
tumult  of  creation,  to  delight  us  with  blooms  of  leisurely 
phrase  and  quiet  thought. 

Gray  and  Collins  were  both  writers  who  labored  in  little 
gardens.  Collins,  indeed,  had  a  small  flower-bed — perhaps 
only  a  pot,  indeed — rather  than  a  garden.  He  produced  in 
it  one  perfect  bloom — the  Ode  to  Evening.  The  rest  of  his 
work  is  carefully  written,  inoffensive,  historically  interest- 
ing. But  his  continual  personification  of  abstract  ideas 
makes  the  greater  part  of  his  verse  lifeless  as  allegories  or 
as  sculpture  in  a  graveyard.  He  was  a  romantic,  an 
inventor  of  new  forms,  in  his  own  day.  He  seems  academic 
to  ours.  His  work  is  that  of  a  man  striking  an  attitude 
rather  than  of  one  expressing  the  deeps  of  a  passionate 
nature.  He  is  always  careful  not  to  confess.  His  Ode  to 
Fear  does  not  admit  us  to  any  of  the  secrets  of  his  maniacal 
and  melancholy  breast.  It  is  an  anticipation  of  the  facti- 
tious gloom  of  Byron,  not  of  the  nerve-shattered  gloom  of 
Dostoevsky.  Collins,  we  cannot  help  feeling,  says  in  it 
what  he  does  not  really  think.  He  glorifies  fear  as  though 
it  were  the  better  part  of  imagination,  going  so  far  as  to 
end  his  ode  with  the  lines : 


GRAY  AND  COLLINS  101 

O  thou  whose  spirit  most  possessed, 
The  sacred  seat  of  Shakespeare's  breast! 
By  all  that  from  thy  prophet  broke 
In  thy  divine  emotions  spoke: 
Hither  again  thy  fury  deal, 
Teach  me  but  once,  like  him,  to  feel ; 
His  cypress  wreath  my  meed  decree, 
And  I,  O  Fear,  will  dwell  with  thee ! 

We  have  only  to  compare  these  lines  with  Claudio's  terrible 
speech  about  death  in  Measure  for  Measure  to  see  the 
difference  between  pretence  and  passion  in  literature. 
Shakespeare  had  no  fear  of  telling  us  what  he  knew  about 
fear.  Collins  lived  in  a  more  reticent  century,  and  attempted 
to  fob  off  a  disease  on  us  as  an  accomplishment.  What 
perpetually  delights  us  in  the  Ode  to  Evening  is  that  here 
at  least  Collins  can  tell  the  truth  without  falsification  or 
chilling  rhetoric.  Here  he  is  writing  of  the  world  as  he  has 
really  seen  it  and  been  moved  by  it.  He  still  makes  use 
of  personifications,  but  they  have  been  transmuted  by  his 
emotion  into  imagery.  In  these  exquisite  formal  unrhymed 
lines,  Collins  has  summed  up  his  view  and  dream  of  life. 
One  knows  that  he  was  not  lying  or  bent  upon  expressing 
any  other  man's  experiences  but  his  own  when  he  described 
how  the 

Air  is  hushed,  save  where  the  weak-eyed  bat, 
With  short  shrill  shriek  flits  by  on  leathern  wing, 
Or  where  the  beetle  winds 
His  small  but  sullen  horn. 

He  speaks  here,  not  in  the  stiffness  of  rhetoric,  but  in  the 
liberty  of  a  new  mood,  never,  for  all  he  knew  or  cared, 
expressed  before.  As  far  as  all  the  rest  of  his  work  is  con- 
cerned, his  passion  for  style  is  more  or  less  wasted.  But 
the  Ode  to  Evening  justifies  both  his  pains  and  his 
indolence.  As  for  the  pains  he  took  with  his  work,  we 
have  it  on  the  authority  of  Thomas  Warton  that  "  all  his 
odes  .  .  .  had  the  marks  of  repeated  correction:  he  was 
perpetually  changing  his  epithets."  As  for  his  indolence, 
his  uncle,  Colonel  Martin,  thought  him  "  too  indolent  even 
for  the  Army,"  and  advised  him  to  enter  the  Church — a 


102  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

step  from  which  he  was  dissuaded,  we  are  told,  by  "  a 
tobacconist  in  Fleet  Street."  For  the  rest,  he  was  the  son 
of  a  hatter,  and  went  mad.  He  is  said  to  have  haunted  the 
cloisters  of  Chichester  Cathedral  during  his  fits  of  melan- 
cholia, and  to  have  uttered  a  strange  accompaniment  of 
groans  and  howls  during  the  playing  of  the  organ.  The 
Castle  of  Indolence  was  for  Collins  no  keep  of  the  pleasures. 
One  may  doubt  if  it  is  ever  this  for  any  artist.  Did  not 
even  Horace  attempt  to  escape  into  Stoicism?  Did  not 
Stevenson  write  Pulvis  et  Umbra? 

Assuredly  Gray,  though  he  was  as  fastidious  in  his 
appetites  as  Collins  was  wild,  cannot  be  called  in  as  a 
witness  to  prove  the  Castle  of  Indolence  a  happy  place. 
"  Low  spirits,"  he  wrote,  when  he  was  still  an  under- 
graduate, "are  my  true  and  faithful  companions;  they  get 
up  with  me,  go  to  bed  with  me,  make  journeys  and  return 
as  I  do;  nay,  and  pay  visits,  and  will  even  affect  to  be 
jocose,  and  force  a  feeble  laugh  with  me."  The  end  of  the 
sentence  shows  (as  do  his  letters,  indeed,  and  his  verses  on 
the  drowning  of  Horace  Walpole's  cat)  that  his  indolent 
melancholy  was  not  without  its  compensations.  He  was  a 
wit,  an  observer  of  himself  and  the  world  about  him,  a  man 
who  wrote  letters  that  have  the  genius  of  the  essay.  Further, 
he  was  Horace  Walpole's  friend,  and  (while  his  father  had 
a  devil  in  him)  his  mother  and  his  aunts  made  a  circle  of 
quiet  tenderness  into  which  he  could  always  retire.  "  I  do 
not  remember,"  Mr.  Gosse  has  said  of  Gray,  "  that  the 
history  of  literature  presents  us  with  the  memoirs  of  any 
other  poet  favoured  by  nature  with  so  many  aunts  as  Gray 
possessed."  This  delicious  sentence  contains  an  important 
criticism  of  Gray.  Gray  was  a  poet  of  the  sheltered  life. 
His  genius  was  shy  and  retiring.  He  had  no  ambition  to 
thrust  himself  upon  the  world.  He  kept  himself  to  himself, 
as  the  saying  is.  He  published  the  Elegy  in  a  Country 
Churchyard  in  1751  only  because  the  editors  of  the 
Magazine  of  Magazines  had  got  hold  of  a  copy  and  Gray 
was  afraid  that  they  would  publish  it  first.  How  lethargic 
a  poet  Gray  was  may  be  gathered  from  the  fact  that  he 


GEAY  AND  COLLINS  103 

began  the  Elegy  as  far  back  as  1746 — Mason  says  it  was 
begun  in  August,  1742 — and  did  not  finish  it  until  June  12, 
1750.  Probably  there  is  no  other  short  poem  in  English 
literature  which  was  brooded  over  for  so  many  seasons. 
Nor  was  there  ever  a  greater  justification  for  patient  brood- 
ing. Gray  in  this  poem  liberated  the  English  imagination 
after  half  a  century  of  prose  and  rhetoric.  He  restored 
poetry  to  its  true  function  as  the  confession  of  an  individual 
soul.  Wordsworth  has  blamed  Gray  for  introducing,  or  at 
least,  assisting  to  introduce,  the  curse  of  poetic  diction  into 
English  literature.  But  poetic  diction  was  in  use  long 
before  Gray.  He  is  remarkable  among  English  poets,  not 
for  having  succumbed  to  poetic  diction,  but  for  having 
triumphed  over  it.  It  is  poetic  feeling,  not  poetic  diction, 
that  distinguishes  him  from  the  mass  of  eighteenth-century 
writers.  It  is  an  interesting  coincidence  that  Gray  and 
Collins  should  have  brought  about  a  poetic  revival  by  the 
rediscovery  of  the  beauty  of  evening,  just  as  Mr.  Yeats  and 
"  A.  E."  brought  about  a  poetic  revival  in  our  own  day  by 
the  rediscovery  of  the  beauty  of  twilight.  Both  schools  of 
poetry  (if  it  is  permissible  to  call  them  schools)  found  in  the 
stillness  of  the  evening  a  natural  refuge  for  the  individual 
soul  from  the  tyrannical  prose  of  common  day.  There  have 
been  critics,  including  Matthew  Arnold,  who  have  denied 
that  the  Elegy  is  the  greatest  of  Gray's  poems.  This,  I 
think,  can  only  be  because  they  have  been  unable  to  see  the 
poetry  for  the  quotations.  No  other  poem  that  Gray  ever 
wrote  was  a  miracle.  The  Bard  is  a  masterpiece  of  imagina- 
tive rhetoric.  But  the  Elegy  is  more  than  this.  It  is  an 
autobiography  and  the  creation  of  a  world  for  the  hearts  of 
men.  Here  Gray  delivers  the  secret  doctrine  of  the  poets. 
Here  he  escapes  out  of  the  eighteenth  century  into  immor- 
tality. One  realizes  what  an  effort  it  must  have  been  to  rise 
above  his  century  when  one  reads  an  earlier  version  of  some 
of  his  most  famous  lines : 

Some  village  Cato  ( )  with  dauntless  breast 

The  little  tyrant  of  his  fields  withstood; 


104  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

Some  mute,  inglorious  Tully  here  may  rest; 
Some  Caesar  guiltless  of  his  country's  blood. 

Could  there  be  a  more  effective  example  of  the  return  to 
reality  than  we  find  in  the  final  shape  of  this  verse? 

Some  village  Hampden,  that  with  dauntless  breast 

The  little  tyrant  of  his  fields  withstood; 
Some  mute,  inglorious  Milton  here  may  rest, 

Some  Cromwell  guiltless  of  his  country's  blood. 

It  is  as  though  suddenly  it  had  been  revealed  to  Gray  that 
poetry  is  not  a  mere  literary  exercise  but  the  image  of 
reality;  that  it  does  not  consist  in  vain  admiration  of  models 
far  off  in  time  and  place,  but  that  it  is  as  near  to  one  as  one's 
breath  and  one's  country.  Not  that  the  Elegy  would  have 
been  one  of  the  great  poems  of  the  world  if  it  had  never 
plunged  deeper  into  the  heart  than  in  this  verse.  It  is  a 
poem  of  beauty  and  sorrow  that  cannot  be  symbolized  by 
such  public  figures  as  Cromwell  and  Milton.  Here  the 
genius  of  the  parting  day,  and  all  that  it  means  to  the 
imagination,  its  quiet  movement  and  its  music,  its  pensive- 
ness  and  its  regrets,  have  been  given  a  form  more  lasting 
than  bronze.  Perhaps  the  poem  owes  a  part  of  its  popu- 
larity to  the  fact  that  it  is  a  great  homily,  though  a  homily 
transfigured.  But  then  does  not  Hamlet  owe  a  great  part 
of  its  popularity  to  the  fact  that  it  is  (among  other  things)  a 
great  blood-and-thunder  play  with  duels  and  a  ghost  ? 

One  of  the  so-called  mysteries  of  literature  is  the  fact  that 
Gray,  having  written  so  greatly,  should  have  written  so 
little.  He  spoke  of  himself  as  a  "  shrimp  of  an  author," 
and  expressed  the  fear  that  his  works  might  be  mistaken 
for  those  of  "  a  pismire  or  a  flea."  But  to  make  a  mystery 
of  the  indolence  of  a  rather  timid,  idle,  and  unadventurous 
scholar,  who  was  blessed  with  more  fastidiousness  than 
passion,  is  absurd.  To  say  perfectly  once  and  for  all  what 
one  has  to  say  is  surely  as  fine  an  achievement  as  to  keep 
restlessly  trying  to  say  it  a  thousand  times  over.  Gray  was 
no  blabber.  It  is  said  that  he  did  not  even  let  his  mother 
and  his  aunts  know  that  he  wrote  poetry.  He  lacked  bold- 


GRAY  AND  COLLINS  105 

ness,  volubility  and  vital  energy.  He  stood  aside  from  life. 
He  would  not  even  take  money  from  his  publishers  for  his 
poetry.  No  wonder  that  he  earned  the  scorn  of  Dr.  Johnson, 
who  said  of  him  to  Boswell,  "  Sir,  he  was  dull  in  his 
company,  dull  in  his  closet,  dull  everywhere.  He  was  dull 
in  a  new  way,  and  that  made  many  think  him  great." 
Luckily,  Gray's  reserve  tempted  him  into  his  own  heart  and 
into  external  nature  for  safety  and  consolation.  Johnson 
could  see  in  him  only  a  "  mechanical  poet."  To  most  of  us 
he  seems  the  first  natural  poet  in  modern  literature. 


XL— ASPECTS  OF  SHELLEY 

(l)    THE  CHARACTER  HALF-COMIC 

SHELLEY  is  one  of  the  most  difficult  of  men  of  genius  to 
portray.  It  is  easy  enough  to  attack  him  or  defend  him— 
to  damn  him  as  an  infidel  or  to  praise  him  because  he  made 
Harriet  Westbrook  so  miserable  that  she  threw  herself  into 
the  Serpentine.  But  this  is  an  entirely  different  thing  from 
recapturing  the  likeness  of  the  man  from  the  nine  hundred 
and  ninety-nine  anecdotes  that  are  told  of  him.  These  for 
the  most  part  leave  him  with  an  air  of  absurdity.  In  his 
habit  of  ignoring  facts  he  appeals  again  and  again  to  one's 
sense  of  the  comic,  like  a  drunken  man  who  fails  to  see  the 
kerb  or  who  walks  into  a  wall.  He  was  indeed  drunken 
with  doctrine.  He  lived  almost  as  much  from  doctrine  as 
from  passion.  He  pursued  theories  as  a  child  chases  butter- 
flies. There  is  a  story  told  of  his  Oxford  days  which  shows 
how  eccentrically  his  theories  converted  themselves  into 
conduct.  Having  been  reading  Plato  with  Hogg,  and 
having  soaked  himself  in  the  theory  of  pre-existence  and 
reminiscence,  he  was  walking  on  Magdalen  Bridge  when 
he  met  a  woman  with  a  child  in  her  arms.  He  seized  the 
child,  while  its  mother,  thinking  he  was  about  to  throw  it 
into  the  river,  clung  on  to  it  by  the  clothes.  "  Will  your 
baby  tell  us  anything  about  pre-existence,  madam?"  he 
asked,  in  a  piercing  voice  and  with  a  wistful  look.  She 
made  no  answer,  but  on  Shelley  repeating  the  question 
she  said,  "  He  cannot  speak."  "  But  surely,"  exclaimed 
Shelley,  "  he  can  if  he  will,  for  he  is  only  a  few  weeks  old! 
He  may  fancy  perhaps  that  he  cannot,  but  it  is  only  a  silly 
whim;  he  cannot  have  forgotten  entirely  the  use  of  speech 
in  so  short  a  time;  the  thing  is  absolutely  impossible." 
The  woman,  obviously  taking  him  for  a  lunatic,  replied 
mildly :  "  It  is  not  for  me  to  dispute  with  you  gentlemen, 

106 


ASPECTS  OF  SHELLEY  107 

but  I  can  safely  declare  that  I  never  heard  him  speak,  nor 
any  child,  indeed,  of  his  age."  Shelley  walked  away  with 
his  friend,  observing,  with  a  deep  sigh :  "  How  provokingly 
close  are  these  new-born  babes ! "  One  can,  possibly,  dis- 
cover similar  anecdotes  in  the  lives  of  other  men  of  genius 
and  of  men  who  thought  they  had  genius.  But  in  such 
cases  it  is  usually  quite  clear  that  the  action  was  a  jest  or  a 
piece  of  attitudinizing,  or  that  the  person  who  performed  it 
was,  as  the  vulgar  say,  "  a  little  above  himself."  In  any 
event  it  almost  invariably  appears  as  an  abnormal  incident 
in  the  life  of  a  normal  man.  Shelley's  life,  on  the  other 
hand,  is  largely  a  concentration  of  abnormal  incidents.  He 
was  habitually  "  a  bit  above  himself."  In  the  above 
incident  he  may  have  been  consciously  behaving  comically. 
But  many  of  his  serious  actions  were  quite  as  comically 
extraordinary. 

Godwin  is  related  to  have  said  that  "  Shelley  was  so 
beautiful,  it  was  a  pity  he  was  so  wicked."  I  doubt  if  there 
is  a  single  literate  person  in  the  world  to-day  who  would 
apply  the  word  "  wicked "  to  Shelley.  It  is  said  that 
Browning,  who  had  begun  as  so  ardent  a  worshipper,  never 
felt  the  same  regard  for  Shelley  after  reading  the  full  story 
of  his  desertion  of  Harriet  Westbrook  and  her  suicide.  But 
Browning  did  not  know  the  full  story.  No  one  of  us  knows 
the  full  story.  On  the  face  of  it,  it  looks  a  peculiarly 
atrocious  thing  to  desert  a  wife  at  a  time  when  she  is  about 
to  become  a  mother.  It  seems  ungenerous,  again,  when  a 
man  has  an  income  of  £1,000  a  year  to  make  an  annual 
allowance  of  only  £200  to  a  deserted  wife  and  her  two 
children.  Shelley,  however,  had  not  married  Harriet  for 
love.  A  nineteen-year-old  boy,  he  had  run  away  with  a 
seventeen-year-old  girl  in  order  to  save  her  from  the 
imagined  tyranny  of  her  father.  At  the  end  of  three  years 
Harriet  had  lost  interest  in  him.  Besides  this,  she  had  an 
intolerable  elder  sister  whom  Shelley  hated.  Harriet's 
sister,  it  is  suggested,  influenced  her  in  the  direction  of  a 
taste  for  bonnet-shops  instead  of  supporting  Shelley's 
exhortations  to  her  that  she  should  cultivate  her  mind. 


108  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

"Harriet,"  says  Mr.  Ingpen  in  Shelley  in  England, 
"  foolishly  allowed  herself  to  be  influenced  by  her  sister, 
under  whose  advice  she  probably  acted  when,  some  months 
earlier,  she  prevailed  upon  Shelley  to  provide  her  with  a 
carriage,  silver  plate  and  expensive  clothes."  We  cannot 
help  sympathizing  a  little  with  Harriet.  At  the  same  time, 
she  was  making  a  breach  with  Shelley  inevitable.  She 
wished  him  to  remain  her  husband  and  to  pay  for  her 
bonnets,  but  she  did  not  wish  even  to  pretend  to  "  live  up 
to  him  "  any  longer.  As  Mr.  Ingpen  says,  "  it  was  love, 
not  matrimony,"  for  which  Shelley  yearned.  "  Marriage," 
Shelley  had  once  written,  echoing  Godwin,  "  is  hateful, 
detestable.  A  kind  of  ineffable,  sickening  disgust  seizes 
my  mind  when  I  think  of  this  most  despotic,  most  unre- 
quired  fetter  which  prejudice  has  forged  to  confine  its 
energies."  Having  lived  for  years  in  a  theory  of  "  anti- 
matrimonialism,"  he  now  saw  himself  doomed  to  one  of 
those  conventional  marriages  which  had  always  seemed  to 
him  a  denial  of  the  holy  spirit  of  love.  This,  too,  at  a  time 
when  he  had  found  in  Mary  Godwin  a  woman  belonging  to 
the  same  intellectual  and  spiritual  race  as  himself — a  woman 
whom  he  loved  as  the  great  lovers  in  all  the  centuries  have 
loved.  Shelley  himself  expressed  the  situation  in  a  few 
characteristic  words  to  Thomas  Love  Peacock :  "  Everyone 
who  knows  me,"  he  said,  "  must  know  that  the  partner  of 
my  life  should  be  one  who  can  feel  poetry  and  understand 
philosophy.  Harriet  is  a  noble  animal,  but  she  can  do 
neither."  "  It  always  appeared  to  me,"  said  Peacock, 
"  that  you  were  very  fond  of  Harriet."  Shelley  replied : 
"  But  you  did  not  know  how  I  hated  her  sister."  And  so 
Harriet's  marriage-lines  were  torn  up,  as  people  say  nowa- 
days, like  a  scrap  of  paper.  That  Shelley  did  not  feel  he 
had  done  anything  inconsiderate  is  shown  by  the  fact  that, 
within  three  weeks  of  his  elopement  with  Mary  Godwin,  he 
was  writing  to  Harriet,  describing  the  scenery  through 
which  Mary  and  he  had  travelled,  and  urging  her  to  come 
and  live  near  them  in  Switzerland.  "  I  write,"  his  letter 
runs — 


ASPECTS  OF  SHELLE7  109 

to  urge  you  to  come  to  Switzerland,  where  you  will  at  least  find  one 
firm  and  constant  friend,  to  whom  your  interests  will  be  always  dear — 
by  whom  your  feelings  will  never  wilfully  be  injured.  From  none  can 
you  expect  this  but  me — all  else  are  unfeeling,  or  selfish,  or  have 
beloved  friends  of  their  own,  as  Mrs.  B[oinville],  to  whom  their  atten- 
tion and  affection  is  confined. 

He  signed  this  letter  (the  lanthe  of  whom  he  speaks  was 
his  daughter)  : 

With    love    to    my    sweet    little    lanthe,    ever    most    affectionately 
yours,  S. 

This  letter,  if  it  had  been  written  by  an  amorist,  would 
seem  either  base  or  priggish.  Coming  from  Shelley,  it  is  a 
miracle  of  what  can  only  be  called  innocence. 

The  most  interesting  of  the  "  new  facts  and  letters  "  in 
Mr.  Ingpen's  book  relate  to  Shelley's  expulsion  from 
Oxford  and  his  runaway  match  with  Harriet,  and  to  his 
father's  attitude  on  both  these  occasions.  Shelley's  father, 
backed  by  the  family  solicitor,  cuts  a  commonplace  figure 
in  the  story.  He  is  simply  the  conventional  grieved  parent. 
He  made  no  effort  to  understand  his  son.  The  most  he  did 
was  to  try  to  save  his  respectability.  He  objected  to 
Shelley's  studying  for  the  Bar,  but  was  anxious  to  make 
him  a  member  of  Parliament ;  and  Shelley  and  he  dined  with 
the  Duke  of  Norfolk  to  discuss  the  matter,  the  result  being 
that  the  younger  man  was  highly  indignant  "  at  what  he 
considered  an  effort  to  shackle  his  mind,  and  introduce  him 
into  life  as  a  mere  follower  of  the  Duke."  How  unpromis- 
ing as  a  party  politician  Shelley  was  may  be  gathered  from 
the  fact  that  in  1811,  the  same  year  in  which  he  dined  with 
the  Duke,  he  not  only  wrote  a  satire  on  the  Regent  a  propos 
of  a  Carlton  House  fete,  but  "  amused  himself  with  throw- 
ing copies  into  the  carriages  of  persons  going  to  Carlton 
House  after  the  fete."  Shelley's  methods  of  propaganda 
were  on  other  occasions  also  more  eccentric  than  is  usual 
with  followers  of  dukes.  His  journey  to  Dublin  to  preach 
Catholic  Emancipation  and  repeal  of  the  Union  was  the 
beginning  of  a  brief  but  extraordinary  period  of  propaganda 
by  pamphlet.  Having  written  a  fivepenny  pamphlet,  An 


110  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

Address  to  the  Irish  People,  he  stood  in  the  balcony  of  his 
lodgings  in  Lower  Sackville  Street,  and  threw  copies  to  the 
passers-by.  "  I  stand,"  he  wrote  at  the  time,  "  at  the 
balcony  of  our  window,  and  watch  till  I  see  a  man  -who 
looks  likely;  I  throw  a  book  to  him."  Harriet,  it  is  to  be 
feared,  saw  only  the  comic  side  of  the  adventure.  Writing 
to  Elizabeth  Kitchener — "  the  Brown  Demon,"  as  Shelley 
called  her  when  he  came  to  hate  her — she  said : 

I'm  sure  you  would  laugh  were  you  to  see  us  give  the  pamphlets. 
We  throw  them  out  of  the  window,  and  give  them  to  men  that  we 
pass  in  the  streets.  For  myself,  I  am  ready  to  die  of  laughter  when 
it  is  done,  and  Percy  looks  so  grave.  Yesterday  he  put  one  into  a 
woman's  hood  and  cloak.  She  knew  nothing  of  it,  and  we  passed 
her.  I  could  hardly  get  on :  my  muscles  were  so  irritated. 

Shelley,  none  the  less,  was  in  regard  to  Ireland  a  wiser 
politician  than  the  politicians,  and  he  was  indulging  in.  no 
turgid  or  fanciful  prose  in  his  Address  when  he  described 
the  Act  of  Union  as  "  the  most  successful  engine  that 
England  ever  wielded  over  the  misery  of  fallen  Ireland." 
Godwin,  with  whom  Shelley  had  been  corresponding  for 
some  time,  now  became  alarmed  at  his  disciple's  reckless 
daring.  "  Shelley,  you  are  preparing  a  scene  of  blood !  " 
he  wrote  to  him  in  his  anxiety.  It  is  evidence  of  the  extent 
of  Godwin's  influence  over  Shelley  that  the  latter  with- 
drew his  Irish  publications  and  returned  to  England,  having 
spent  about  six  weeks  on  his  mission  to  the  Irish  people. 

Mr.  Ingpen  has  really  written  a  new  biography  of  Shelley 
rather  than  a  compilation  of  new  material.  The  new  docu- 
ments incorporated  in  the  book  were  discovered  by  the 
successors  to  Mr.  William  Whitton,  the  Shelleys'  .family 
solicitor,  but  they  can  hardly  be  said  to  add  much  to  our 
knowledge  of  the  facts  about  Shelley.  They  prove,  how- 
ever, that  his  marriage  to  Harriet  Westbrook  took  place  in 
a  Presbyterian  church  in  Edinburgh,  and  that,  at  a  later 
period,  he  was  twice  arrested  for  debt.  Mr.  Ingpen  holds 
that  they  also  prove  that  Shelley  "  appeared  on  the  boards 
of  the  Windsor  Theatre  as  an  actor  in  Shakespearean 


ASPECTS  OF  SHELLEY  111 

drama."  But  we  have  only  William  Whitton,  the  solicitor's 
words  for  this,  and  it  is  clear  that  he  had  been  at  no  pains  to 
investigate  the  matter.  "  It  was  mentioned  to  me  yester- 
day," he  wrote  to  Shelley's  father  in  November,  1815, 
"  that  Mr.  P.  B.  Shelley  was  exhibiting  himself  on  the 
Windsor  stage,  in  the  character  of  Shakespeare's  plays, 
under  the  figured  name  of  Cooks."  "  The  character  of 
Shakespeare's  plays "  sounds  oddly,  as  though  Whitton 
did  not  know  what  he  was  talking  about,  unless  he  was 
referring  to  allegorical  "  tableaux  vivants  "  of  some  sort. 
Certainly,  so  vague  a  rumour  as  this — the  sort  of  rumour 
that  would  naturally  arise  in  regard  to  a  young  man  who 
was  supposed  to  have  gone  to  the  bad — is  no  trustworthy 
evidence  that  Shelley  was  ever  "  an  actor  in  Shakespearean 
drama."  At  the  same  time,  Mr.  Ingpen  deserves  en- 
thusiastic praise  for  the  untiring  pursuit  of  facts  which  has 
enabled  him  to  add  an  indispensable  book  to  the  Shelley 
library.  I  wish  that,  as  he  has  to  some  extent  followed  the 
events  of  Shelley's  life  until  the  end,  he  had  filled  in  the 
details  of  the  life  abroad  as  well  as  the  life  in  England. 
His  book  is  an  absorbing  biography,  but  it  remains  of 
set  purpose  a  biography  with  gaps.  He  writes,  it 
should  be  added,  in  the  spirit  of  a  collector  of  facts 
rather  than  of  a  psychologist.  One  has  to  create  one's 
own  portrait  of  Shelley  out  of  the  facts  he  has  brought 
together. 

One  is  surprised,  by  the  way,  to  find  so  devoted  a  student 
of  Shelley — a  student  to  whom  every  lover  of  literature  is 
indebted  for  his  edition  of  Shelley's  letters  as  well  as  for 
the  biography — referring  to  Shelley  again  and  again  as 
"  Bysshe."  Shelley's  family,  it  may  be  admitted,  called 
him  "  Bysshe."  But  never  was  a  more  inappropriate  name 
given  to  a  poet  who  brought  down  music  from  heaven.  At 
the  same  time,  as  we  read  his  biography  over  again,  we  feel 
that  it  is  possible  that  the  two  names  do  somehow  express 
two  incongruous  aspects  of  the  man.  In  his  life  he  was,  to 
a  great  extent,  Bysshe;  in  his  poetry  he  was,  Shelley. 
Shelley  wrote  The  Skylark  and  Pan  and  The  West  Wind. 


THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 


It  was  Bysshe  who  imagined  that  a  fat  old  woman  in  a 
train  had  infected  him  with  incurable  elephantiasis.  Mr. 
Ingpen  quotes  Peacock's  account  of  this  characteristic  illu- 
sion: 

He  was  continually  on  the  watch  for  its  symptoms;  his  legs  were 
to  swell  to  the  size  of  an  elephant's,  and  his  skin  was  to  be  crumpled 
over  like  goose-skin.  He  would  draw  the  skin  of  his  own  hands, 
arms,  and  neck,  very  tight,  and,  if  he  discovered  any  deviation  from 
smoothness,  he  would  seize  the  person  next  to  him  and  endeavour,  by 
a  corresponding  pressure,  to  see  if  any  corresponding  deviation 
existed.  He  often  startled  young  ladies  in  an  evening  party  by  this 
singular  process,  which  was  as  instantaneous  as  a  flash  of  lightning. 

Mr.  Ingpen  has  wisely  omitted  nothing  about  Bysshe,  how- 
ever ludicrous.  After  reading  a  biography  so  unsparing  in 
tragi-comic  narrative,  however,  one  has  to  read  Prometheus 
again  in  order  to  recall  that  divine  song  of  a  freed  spirit, 
the  incarnation  of  which  we  call  Shelley. 


(2)    THE   EXPERIMENTALIST 

Mr.  Buxton  Forman  has  an  original  way  of  recommend- 
ing books  to  our  notice.  In  an  introduction  to  Medwin's 
Life  of  Percy  Bysshe  Shelley  he  begins  by  frankly  telling 
us  that  it  is  a  bad  book,  and  that  the  only  point  of  contro- 
versy in  regard  to  it  is  as  to  the  kind  of  bad  book  it  is. 
"Last  century,"  he  declares,  "produced  a  plethora  of  bad 
books  that  were  valuable,  and  of  fairly  good  books  with  no 
lasting  value.  Medwin's  distinction  is  that  he  left  two  bad 
books  which  were  and  still  are  valuable,  but  whether  the 
Byron  Conversations  and  the  Life  of  Shelley  should  be 
called  the  two  most  valuable  bad  books  of  the  century  or  the 
two  worst  valuable  books  of  the  century  is  a  hard  point  in 
casuistry."  Medwin,  we  may  admit,  even  if  he  was  not  the 
"  perfect  idiot "  he  has  been  called,  would  have  been  a  dull 
fellow  enough  if  he  had  never  met  Shelley  or  Byron.  But 
he  did  meet  them,  and  as  a  result  he  will  live  to  all  eternity, 
or  near  it,  a  little  gilded  by  their  rays.  He  was  not,  Mr. 
Forman  contends,  the  original  of  the  man  who  "  saw 


ASPECTS  OF  SHELLEY  113 

Shelley  plain  "  in  Browning's  lyric.  None  the  less,  he  is 
precisely  that  man  in  the  imaginations  of  most  of  us.  A 
relative  of  Shelley,  a  school  friend,  an  intimate  of  the  last 
years  in  Italy,  even  though  we  know  him  to  have  been  one 
of  those  men  who  cannot  help  lying  because  they  are  so 
stupid,  he  still  fascinates  us  as  a  treasury  of  sidelights  on 
one  of  the  loveliest  and  most  flashing  lives  in  the  history  of 
English  literature. 

Shelley  is  often  presented  to  us  as  a  kind  of  creature  from 
fairyland,  continually  wounded  in  a  struggle  with  the 
despotic  realities  of  earth.  Here  and  in  his  poetry,  however, 
we  see  him  rather  as  the  herald  of  the  age  of  science :  he 
was  a  born  experimentalist;  he  experimented,  not  only  in 
chemistry,  but  in  life  and  in  politics.  At  school,  he  and 
his  solar  microscope  were  inseparable.  Ardently  interested 
in  chemistry,  he  once,  we  are  told,  borrowed  a  book  on  the 
subject  from  Medwin's  father,  but  his  own  father  sent  it 
back  with  a  note  saying :  "  I  have  returned  the  book  on 
chemistry,  as  it  is  a  forbidden  thing  at  Eton."  During  his 
life  at  University  College,  Oxford,  his  delight  in  chemical 
experiments  continued. 

His  chemical  operations  seemed  to  an  unskilful  observer  to  premise 
nothing  but  disasters.  He  had  blown  himself  up  at  Eton.  He  had 
inadvertently  swallowed  some  mineral  poison,  which  he  declared  had 
seriously  injured  his  health,  and  from  the  effects  of  which  he  should 
never  recover.  His  hands,  his  clothes,  his  books,  and  his  furniture, 
were  stained  and  covered  by  medical  acids — more  than  one  hole  in 
the  carpet  could  elucidate  the  ultimate  phenomena  of  combustion, 
especially  in  the  middle  of  the  room,  where  the  floor  had  also  been 
burnt  by  his  mixing  ether  or  some  other  fluid  in  a  crucible,  and  the 
honourable  wound  was  speedily  enlarged  by  rents,  for  the  philosopher, 
as  he  hastily  crossed  the  room  in  pursuit  of  truth,  was  frequently 
caught  in  it  by  the  foot. 

The  same  eagerness  of  discovery  is  shown  in  his  passion  for 
kite-flying  as  a  boy : 

He  was  fond  of  flying  kites,  and  at  Field  Place  made  an  electrical 
one,  an  idea  borrowed  from  Franklin,  in  order  to  draw  lightning  from 
the  clouds — fire  from  Heaven,  like  a  new  Prometheus. 


114  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

And  his  generous  dream  of  bringing  science  to  the  service 
of  humanity  is  revealed  in  his  reflection: 

What  a  comfort  it  would  be  to  the  poor  at  all  times,  and  especially 
in  winter,  if  we  could  be  masters  of  caloric,  and  could  at  will  furnish 
them  with  a  constant  supply! 

Shelley's  many-sided  zeal  in  the  pursuit  of  truth  naturally 
led  him  early  to  invade  theology.  From  his  Eton  days,  he 
used  to  enter  into  controversies  by  letter  with  learned 
divines.  Medwin  declares  that  he  saw  one  such  corre- 
spondence in  which  Shelley  engaged  in  argument  with  a 
bishop  "  under  the  assumed  name  of  a  woman."  It  must 
have  been  in  a  somewhat  similar  mood  that  "  one  Sunday 
after  we  had  been  to  Rowland  Hill's  chapel,  and  were 
dining  together  in  the  city,  he  wrote  to  him  under  an 
assumed  name,  proposing  to  preach  to  his  congregation." 

Certainly,  Shelley  loved  mystification  scarcely  less  than 
he  loved  truth  itself.  He  was  a  romanticist  as  well  as  a 
philosopher,  and  the  reading  in  his  childhood  of  novels  like 
Zofloya  the  Moor — a  work  as  wild,  apparently,  as  anything 
Cyril  Tourneur  ever  wrote — excited  his  imagination!  to 
impossible  flights  of  adventure.  Few  of  us  have  the 
endurance  to  study  the  effects  of  this  ghostly  reading  in 
Shelley's  own  work — his  forgotten  novels,  Zastrozzi,  and 
St.  Irvyne  or  the  Rosicrucian — but  we  can  see  how  his 
life  itself  borrowed  some  of  the  extravagances  of  fiction. 
Many  of  his  recorded  adventures  are  supposed  to  have  been 
hallucinations,  like  the  story  of  the  "  stranger  in  a  military 
cloak,"  who,  seeing*  him  in  a  post-office  at  Pisa,  said, 

"What!  Are  you  that  d d  atheist,  Shelley?"  and 

felled  him  to  the  ground.  On  the  other  hand,  Shelley's 
story  of  his  being  attacked  by  a  midnight  assassin  in  Wales, 
after  being  disbelieved  for  three-quarters  of  a  century,  has 
in  recent  years  been  corroborated  in  the  most  unexpected 
way.  Wild  a  fiction  as  his  life  was  in  many  respects,  it  was 
a  fiction  he  himself  sincerely  and  innocently  believed.  His 
imaginative  appetite,  having  devoured  science  by  day  and 
sixpenny  romances  by  night,  still  remained  unsatisfied, 


ASPECTS  OF  SHELLEY  115 

and,  quite  probably,  went  on  to  mix  up  reality  and  make- 
believe  past  all  recognition  for  its  next  dish.  Francis 
Thompson,  with  all  respect  to  many  critics,  was  right  when 
he  noted  what  a  complete  playfellow  Shelley  was  in  his  life. 
When  he  was  in  London  after  his  expulsion  from  the 
University,  he  could  throw  himself  with  all  his  being  into 
childish  games  like  skimming  stones  on  the  Serpentine, 
"  counting  with  the  utmost  glee  the  number  of  bounds,  as 
the  flat  stones  flew  skimming  over  the  surface  of  the  water." 
He  found  a  perfect  pleasure  in  paper  boats,  and  we  hear  of 
his  making  a  sail  on  one  occasion  out  of  a  ten-pound  note — 
one  of  those  myths,  perhaps,  which  gather  round  poets.  It 
must  have  been  the  innocence  of  pleasure  shown  in  games 
like  these  that  made  him  an  irresistible  companion  to  so 
many  comparatively  prosaic  people.  For  the  idea  that 
Shelley  in  private  life  was  aloof  and  unpopular  from  his 
childhood  up  is  an  entirely  false  one.  As  Medwin  points 
out,  in  referring  to  his  school-days,  he  "  must  have  had  a 
rather  large  circle  of  friends,  since  his  parting  breakfast  at 
Eton  cost  £50." 

Even  at  the  distance  of  a  century,  we  are  still  seized 
by  the  fascination  of  that  boyish  figure  with  the  "  stag 
eyes,"  so  enthusiastically  in  pursuit  of  truth  and  of  dreams, 
of  trifles  light  as  air  and  of  the  redemption  of  the  human 
race.  "  His  figure,"  Hogg  tells  us,  "  was  slight  and  fragile, 
and  yet  his  bones  were  large  and  strong.  He  was  tall,  but 
he  stooped  so  much  that  he  seemed  of  low  stature."  And, 
in  Medwin's  book,  we  even  become  reconciled  to  that  shrill 
voice  of  his,  which  Lamb  and  most  other  people  found  so 
unpleasant.  Medwin  gives  us  nothing  in  the  nature  of  a 
portrait  of  Shelley  in  these  heavy  and  incoherent  pages;  but 
he  gives  us  invaluable  materials  for  such  a  portrait — in 
descriptions,  for  instance,  of  how  he  used  to  go  on  with  his 
reading,  even  when  he  was  out  walking,  and  would  get  so 
absorbed  in  his  studies  that  he  sometimes  asked,  "  Mary, 
have  I  dined  ? "  More  important,  as  revealing  his  too 
exquisite  sensitiveness,  is  the  account  of  how  Medwin  saw 
him,  "  after  threading  the  carnival  crowd  in  the  Lung' 


116  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

Arno  Corsos,  throw  himself,  half-fainting,  into  a  chair, 
overpowered  by  the  atmosphere  of  evil  passions,  as  he  used 
to  say,  in  that  sensual  and  unintellectual  crowd."  Some 
people,  on  reading  a  passage  like  this,  will  rush  to  the 
conclusion  that  Shelley  was  a  prig.  But  the  prig  is  a  man 
easily  wounded  by  blows  to  his  self-esteem,  not  by  the 
miseries  and  imperfections  of  humanity.  Shelley,  no  doubt, 
was  more  convinced  of  his  own  Tightness  than  any  other 
man  of  the  same  fine  genius  in  English  history.  He  did  not 
indulge  in  repentance,  like  Burns  and  Byron.  On  the  other 
hand,  he  was  not  in  the  smallest  degree  an  egolator.  He 
had  not  even  such  an  innocent  egoism  as  Thoreau's.  He 
was  always  longing  to  give  himself  to  the  world.  In  the 
Italian  days  we  find  him  planning  an  expedition  with  Byron 
to  rescue,  by  main  force,  a  man  who  was  in  danger  of  being 
burnt  alive  for  sacrilege.  He  has  often  been  denounced  for 
his  heartless  treatment  of  Harriet  Westbrook,  and,  though 
we  may  not  judge  him,  it  is  possible  that  a  better  man 
would  have  behaved  differently.  But  it  was  a  mark  of  his 
unselfishness,  at  least,  that  he  went  through  the  marriage 
service  with  both  his  wives,  in  spite  of  his  principles,  that 
he  so  long  endured  Harriet's  sister  as  the  tyrant  of  his 
house,  and  that  he  neglected  none  of  his  responsibilities  to 
her,  in  so  far  as  they  were  consistent  with  his  deserting  her 
for  another  woman.  This  may  seem  a  bizarre  defence,  but 
I  merely  wish  to  emphasize  the  fact  that  Shelley  behaved 
far  better  than  ninety-nine  men  out  of  a  hundred  would  have 
done,  given  the  same  principles  and  the  same  circumstances. 
He  was  a  man  who  never  followed  the  line  of  least  resistance 
or  of  self-indulgence,  as  most  men  do  in  their  love  affairs. 
He  fought  a  difficult  fight  all  his  life  in  a  world  that  ignored 
him,  except  when  it  was  denouncing  him  as  a  polluter  of 
Society.  Whatever  mistakes  we  may  consider  him  to  have 
made,  we  can  hardly  fail  to  admit  that  he  was  one  of  the 
greatest  of  English  Puritans. 


ASPECTS  OF  SHELLEY  117 

(3)    THE    POET    OF    HOPE 

Shelley  is  the  poet  for  a  revolutionary  age.  He  is  the 
poet  of  hope,  as  Wordsworth  is  the  poet  of  wisdom.  He 
has  been  charged  with  being  intangible  and  unearthly,  but 
he  is  so  only  in  the  sense  in  which  the  future  is  intangible 
and  unearthly.  He  is  no  more  unearthly  than  the  skylark  or 
the  rainbow  or  the  dawn.  His  world,  indeed,  is  a  universe 
of  skylarks  and  rainbows  and  dawns — a  universe  in  which 

Like  a  thousand  dawns  on  a  single  night 
The  splendours  rise  and  spread. 

He  at  once  dazzles  and  overwhelms  us  with  light  and 
music.  He  is  unearthly  in  the  sense  that  as  we  read  him 
we  seem  to  move  in  a  new  element.  We  lose  to  some 
extent  the  gravity  of  flesh  and  find  ourselves  wandering 
among  stars  and  sunbeams,  or  diving  under  sea  or  stream 
to  visit  the  buried  day  of  some  wonder-strewn  cave.  There 
are  other  great  poets  besides  Shelley  who  have  had  a  vision 
of  the  heights  and  depths.  Compared  with  him,  however, 
they  have  all  about  them  something  of  Goliath's  disadvan- 
tageous bulk.  Shelley  alone  retains  a  boyish  grace  like 
David's,  and  does  not  seem  to  groan  under  the  burden  of 
his  task.  He  does  not  round  his  shoulders  in  gloom  in  the 
presence  of  Heaven  and  Hell.  His  cosmos  is  a  constella- 
tion. His  thousand  dawns  are  shaken  out  over  the  earth 
with  a  promise  that  turns  even  the  long  agony  of  Prome- 
theus into  joy.  There  is  no  other  joy  in  literature  like 
Shelley's.  It  is  the  joy  not  of  one  who  is  blind  or  un- 
troubled, but  of  one  who,  in  a  midnight  of  tyranny  and 
suffering  of  the  unselfish,  has  learned 

...  to  hope  till  Hope  creates 
From  its  own  wreck  the  thing  it  contemplates. 

To  write  like  this  is  to  triumph  over  death.  It  is  to  cease 
to  be  a  victim  and  to  become  a  creator.  Shelley  recognized 
that  the  world  had  been  bound  into  slavery  by  the  Devil, 
but  he  more  than  anyone  else  believed  that  it  was  possible 


118  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

for  the  human  race  in  a  single  dayspring  to  recover  the  first 
intention  of  God. 

In  the  great  morning  of  the  world, 
The  Spirit  of  God  with  might  unfurled 
The  flag  of  Freedom  over  Chaos. 

Shelley  desired  to  restore  to  earth  not  the  past  of  man 
but  the  past  of  God.  He  lacked  the  bad  sort  of  historical 
sense  that  will  sacrifice  the  perfect  to-morrow  to  pride  in  the 
imperfect  yesterday.  He  was  the  devoted  enemy  of  that 
dark  spirit  of  Power  which  holds  fast  to  the  old  greed  as  to 
a  treasure.  In  Hellas  he  puts  into  the  mouth  of  Christ  a 
reproof  of  Mahomet  which  is  a  reproof  to  all  the  Carsons 
and  those  who  are  haters  of  a  finer  future  to-day. 

Obdurate  spirit! 

Thou  seest  but  the  Past  in  the  To-come. 
Pride  is  thy  error  and  thy  punishment. 
Boast  not  thine  empire,  dream  not  that  thy  worlds 
Are  more  than  furnace-sparks  or  rainbow-drops 
Before  the  Power  that  wields  and  kindles  them. 
True  greatness  asks  not  space. 

There  are  some  critics  who  would  like  to  separate 
Shelley's  politics  from  his  poetry.  But  Shelley's  politics 
are  part  of  his  poetry.  They  are  the  politics  of  hope  as  his 
poetry  is  the  poetry  of  hope.  Europe  did  not  adopt  his 
politics  in  the  generation  that  followed  the  Napoleonic 
Wars,  and  the  result  is  we  have  had  an  infinitely  more 
terrible  war  a  hundred  years  later.  Every  generation  rejects 
Shelley;  it  prefers  incredulity  to  hope,  fear  to  joy,  obedience 
to  common  sense,  and  is  surprised  when  the  logic  of  its 
common  sense  turns  out  to  be  a  tragedy  such  as  even  the 
wildest  orgy  of  idealism  could  not  have  produced.  Shelley 
must,  no  doubt,  still  seem  a  shocking  poet  to  an  age  in 
which  the  limitation  of  the  veto  of  the  House  of  Lords  was 
described  as  a  revolutionary  step.  To  Shelley  even  the  new 
earth  for  which  the  Bolsheviks  are  calling  would  not  have 
seemed  an  extravagant  demand.  He  was  almost  the  only 
English  poet  up  to  his  own  time  who  believed  that  the 
world  had  a  future.  One  can  think  of  no  other  poet  to 


ASPECTS  OF  SHELLEY  119 

whom  to  turn  for  the  prophetic  music  of  a  real  League  of 
Nations.  Tennyson  may  have  spoken  of  the  federation  of 
the  world,  but  his  passion  was  not  for  that  but  for  the 
British  Empire.  He  had  the  craven  fear  of  being  great  on 
any  but  the  old  Imperialist  lines.  His  work  did  nothing 
to  make  his  country  more  generous  than  it  was  before. 
Shelley,  on  the  other  hand,  creates  for  us  a  new  atmosphere 
of  generosity.  His  patriotism  was  love  of  the  people  of 
England,  not  love  of  the  Government  of  England.  Hence, 
when  the  Government  of  England  allied  itself  with  the 
oppressors  of  mankind,  he  saw  nothing  unpatriotic  in 
arraigning  it  as  he  would  have  arraigned  a  German  or  a 
Russian  Government  in  the  same  circumstances. 

He  arraigned  it,  indeed,  in  the  preface  to  Hellas  in  a 
paragraph  which  the  publisher  nervously  suppressed,  and 
which  was  only  restored  in  1892  by  Mr.  Buxton  Forman. 
The  seditious  paragraph  ran: 

Should  the  English  people  ever  become  free,  they  will  reflect  upon 
the  part  which  those  who  presume  to  represent  them  will  have  played 
in  the  great  drama  of  the  revival  of  liberty,  with  feelings  which  it 
would  become  them  to  anticipate.  This  is  the  age  of  the  war  of  the 
oppressed  against  the  oppressors,  and  every  one  of  those  ringleaders 
of  the  privileged  gangs  of  murderers  and  swindlers,  called  Sovereigns, 
look  to  each  other  for  aid  against  the  common  enemy,  and  suspend 
their  mutual  jealousies  in  the  presence  of  a  mightier  fear.  Of  this 
holy  alliance  all  the  despots  of  the  earth  are  virtual  members.  But  a 
new  race  has  arisen  throughout  Europe,  nursed  in  the  abhorrence  of 
the  opinions  which  are  its  chains,  and  she  will  continue  to  produce 
fresh  generations  to  accomplish  that  destiny  which  tyrants  foresee  and 
dread. 

It  is  nearly  a  hundred  years  since  Shelley  proclaimed  this 
birth  of  a  new  race  throughout  Europe.  Would  he  have 
turned  pessimist  if  he  had  lived  to  see  the  world  infected 
with  Prussianism  as  it  has  been  in  our  time?  I  do  not 
think  he  would.  He  would  have  been  the  singer  of  the  new 
race  to-day  as  he  was  then.  To  him  the  resurrection  of  the 
old  despotism,  foreign  and  domestic,  would  have  seemed 
but  a  fresh  assault  by  the  Furies  on  the  body  of  Prometheus. 
He  would  have  scattered  the  Furies  with  a  song. 


120  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

For  Shelley  has  not  failed.  He  is  one  of  those  who  have 
brought  down  to  earth  the  creative  spirit  of  freedom.  And 
that  spirit  has  never  ceased  to  brood,  with  however  disap- 
pointing results,  over  the  chaos  of  Europe  until  our  own 
time.  His  greatest  service  to  freedom  is,  perhaps,  that  he 
made  it  seem,  not  a  policy,  but  a  part  of  Nature.  He  made 
it  desirable  as  the  spring,  lovely  as  a  cloud  in  a  blue  sky, 
gay  as  a  lark,  glad  as  a  wave,  golden  as  a  star,  mighty  as  a 
wind.  Other  poets  speak  of  freedom,  and  invite  the  birds 
on  to  the  platform.  Shelley  spoke  of  freedom  and  himself 
became  a  bird  in  the  air,  a  wave  of  the  sea.  He  did  not 
humiliate  beauty  into  a  lesson.  He  scattered  beauty  among 
men  not  as  a  homily  but  as  a  spirit — 

Singing  hymns  unbidden,  till  the  world  is  wrought 
To  sympathy  with  hopes  and  fears  it  heeded  not. 

His  politics  are  implicit  in  The  Cloud  and  The  Skylark  and 
The  West  Wind,  no  less  than  in  The  Mask  of  Anarchy. 
His  idea  of  the  State  as  well  as  his  idea  of  sky  and  stream 
and  forest  was  rooted  in  the  exuberant  imagination  of  a 
lover.  The  whole  body  of  his  work,  whether  lyrical  in  the 
strictest  sense  or  propagandist,  is  in  the  nature  of  a  Book 
of  Revelation. 

It  is  impossible  to  say  whether  he  might  not  have  been  a 
greater  poet  if  he  had  not  been  in  such  haste  to  rebuild  the 
world.  He  would,  one  fancies,  have  been  a  better  artist  if 
he  had  had  a  finer  patience  of  phrase.  On  the  other  hand, 
his  achievement  even  in  the  sphere  of  phrase  and  music  is 
surpassed  by  no  poet  since  Shakespeare.  He  may  hurry 
along  at  intervals  in  a  cloud  of  second-best  words,  but  out 
of  the  cloud  suddenly  comes  a  song  like  Ariel's  and  a 
radiance  like  the  radiance  of  a  new  day.  With  him  a  poem 
is  a  melody  rather  than  a  manuscript.  Not  since  Prospero 
commanded  songs  from  his  attendant  spirits  has  there  been 
singing  heard  like  the  Hymn  of  Pan  and  The  Indian 
Serenade.  The  Cloud  is  the  most  magical  transmutation 
of  things  seen  into  things  heard  in  the  English  language. 


ASPECTS  OF  SHELLEY  121 

Not  that  Shelley  misses  the  wonder  of  things  seen.    But  he 
sees  things,  as  it  were,  musically. 

My  soul  is  an  enchanted  boat 
Which,  like  a  sleeping  swan,  doth  float 
Upon  the  silver  waves  of  thy  sweet  singing. 

There  is  more  of  music  than  painting   in  this  kind   of 
writing. 

There  is  no  other  music  but  Shelley's  which  seems  to  me 
likely  to  bring  healing  to  the  madness  of  the  modern  Saul. 
For  this  reason  I  hope  that  Professor  Herford's  fine  edition 
of  the  shorter  poems  (arranged  for  the  first  time  in  chrono- 
logical order)  will  encourage  men  and  women  to  turn  to 
Shelley  again.  Professor  Herford  promises  us  a  companion 
volume  on  the  same  lines,  containing  the  dramas  and  longer 
poems,  if  sufficient  interest  is  shown  in  his  book.  The 
average  reader  will  probably  be  content  with  Mr.  Hutchin- 
son's  cheap  and  perfect  "  Oxford  Edition "  of  Shelley. 
But  the  scholar,  as  well  as  the  lover  of  a  beautiful  page, 
will  find  in  Professor  Herford's  edition  a  new  pleasure  in 
old  verse. 


XIL— THE  WISDOM  OF  COLERIDGE 

(l)     COLERIDGE    AS    CRITIC 

COLERIDGE  was  the  thirteenth  child  of  a  rather  queer  clergy- 
man. The  Rev.  John  Coleridge  was  queer  enough  in 
having  thirteen  children:  he  was  queerer  still  in  being  the 
author  of  a  Latin  grammar  in  which  he  renamed  the 
"  ablative  "  the  "  quale-quare-quidditive  case."  Coleridge 
was  thus  born  not  only  with  an  unlucky  number,  but  trail- 
ing clouds  of  definitions.  He  was  in  some  respects  the 
unluckiest  of  all  Englishmen  of  literary  genius.  He  leaves 
on  us  an  impression  of  failure  as  no  other  writer  of  the 
same  stature  does.  The  impression  may  not  be  justified. 
There  are  few  writers  who  would  not  prefer  the  magnificent 
failure  of  a  Coleridge  to  their  own  little  mole-hill  of  suc- 
cess. Coleridge  was  a  failure  in  comparison  not  with 
ordinary  men,  but  only  with  the  immense  shadow  of  his 
own  genius.  His  imperfection  is  the  imperfection  of  a 
demi-god.  Charles  Lamb  summed  up  the  truth  about  his 
genius  as  well  as  about  his  character  in  that  final  phrase, 
"  an  archangel  a  little  damaged."  This  was  said  at  a  time 
when  the  archangel  was  much  more  than  a  little  damaged 
by  the  habit  of  laudanum;  bu-t  even  then  Lamb  wrote: 
"  His  face,  when  he  repeats  his  verses,  hath  its  ancient 
glory."  Most  of  Coleridge's  great  contemporaries  were 
aware  of  that  glory.  Even  those  who  were  afterwards  to 
be  counted  among  his  revilers,  such  as  Hazlitt  and  De 
Quincey,  had  known  what  it  was  to  be  disciples  at  the 
feet  of  this  inspired  ruin.  They  spoke  not  only  of  his 
mind,  but  even  of  his  physical  characteristics — his  voice 
and  his  hair — as  though  these  belonged  to  the  one  man  of 
his  time  whose  food  was  ambrosia.  Even  as  a  boy  at 
Christ's  Hospital,  according. to  Lamb,  he  used  to  make 

122 


THE  WISDOM  OF  COLERIDGE  123 

the  "  casual  passer  through  the  Cloisters  stand  still, 
intranced  with  admiration  (while  he  weighed  the  dispropor- 
tion between  the  speech  and  the  garb  of  the  young  Miran- 
dola),  to  hear  thee  unfold,  in  thy  deep  and  sweet 
intonations,  the  mysteries  of  lamblichus,  or  Plotinus  .  .  . 
or  reciting  Homer  in  the  Greek,  or  Pindar — while  the  walls 
of  the  old  Grey  Friars  re-echoed  to  the  accents  of  the 
inspired  charity-boy!" 

It  is  exceedingly  important  that,  as  we  read  Coleridge, 
we  should  constantly  remember  what  an  archangel  he  was 
in  the  eyes  of  his  contemporaries.  Christabel  and  Kubla 
Kahn  we  could  read,  no  doubt,  in  perfect  enjoyment  even 
if  we  did  not  know  the  author's  name.  For  the  rest,  there 
is  so  much  flagging  of  wing  both  in  his  verse  and  in  his 
prose  that,  if  we  did  not  remind  ourselves  what  flights  he 
was  born  to  take,  we  might  persuade  ourselves  at  times 
that  there  was  little  in  his  work  but  the  dull  flappings  and 
slitherings  of  a  penguin.  His  genius  is  intermittent  and 
comes  arbitrarily  to  an  end.  He  is  inspired  only  in  frag- 
ments and  aphorisms.  He  was  all  but  incapable  of  writing 
a  complete  book  or  a  complete  poem  at  a  high  level.  His 
irresponsibility  as  an  author  is  described  in  that  sentence 
in  which  he  says :  "  I  have  laid  too  many  eggs  in  the  hot 
sands  of  this  wilderness,  the  world,  with  ostrich  careless- 
ness and  ostrich  oblivion."  His  literary  plans  had  a 
ludicrous  way  of  breaking  down.  It  was  characteristic  of 
him  that,  in  1817,  when  he  projected  a  complete  edition  of 
his  poems,  under  the  title  Sibylline  Leaves,  he  omitted  to 
publish  Volume  I.  and  published  only  Volume  II.  He 
would  announce  a  lecture  on  Milton,  and  then  give  his 
audience  "  a  very  eloquent  and  popular  discourse  on  the 
general  character  of  Shakespeare."  His  two  finest  poems 
he  never  finished.  He  wrote  not  by  an  act  of  the  will  but 
according  to  the  wind,  and  when  the  wind  dropped  he 
came  to  earth.  It  was  as  though  he  could  soar  but  was 
unable  to  fly.  It  is  this  that  differentiates  him  from  other 
great  poets  or  critics.  None  of  them  has  left  such  a  record 
of  unfulfilled  purposes.  It  is  not  that  he  did  not  get 


124  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

through  an  enormous  amount  of  work,  but  that,  like  the 
revellers  in  Mr.  Chesterton's  poem,  he  "went  to  Birming- 
ham by  way  of  Beachy  Head,"  and  in  the  end  he  did  not 
get  to  Birmingham.  Sir  Arthur  Quiller-Couch  gives  an 
amusing  account  of  the  way  in  which  Biographia  Liter  aria 
came  to  be  written.  Originally,  in  1815,  it  was  conceived 
as  a  preface — to  be  "  done  in  two,  or  at  farthest  three  days  " 
— to  a  collection  of  some  "  scattered  and  manuscript 
poems."  Two  months  later  the  plan  had  changed. 
Coleridge  was  now  busy  on  a  preface  to  an  Autobiographia 
Literaria,  sketches  of  my  literary  Life  and  Opinions.  This 
in  turn  developed  into  "a  full  account  (raisonne)  of  the 
controversy  concerning  Wordsworth's  poems  and  theory," 
with  a  "  disquisition  on  the  powers  of  Association  .  .  . 
and  on  the  generic  difference  between  the  Fancy  and  the 
Imagination."  This  ran  to  such  a  length  that  he  decided 
not  to  use  it  as  a  preface,  but  to  amplify  it  into  a  work  in 
three  volumes.  He  succeeded  in  writing  the  first  volume, 
but  he  found  himself  unable  to  fill  the  second.  "Then, 
as  the  volume  obstinately  remained  too  small,  he  tossed  in 
Satyrane,  an  epistolary  account  of  his  wanderings  in  Ger- 
many, topped  up  with  a  critique  of  a  bad  play,  and  gave 
the  whole  painfully  to  the  world  in  July,  1817."  It  is  one 
of  the  ironies  of  literary  history  that  Coleridge,  the  censor 
of  the  incongruous  in  literature,  the  vindicator  of  the  formal 
purpose  as  opposed  to  the  haphazard  inspiration  of  the 
greatest  of  writers,  a  missionary  of  the  "  shaping  imagina- 
tion," should  himself  have  given  us  in  his  greatest  book  of 
criticism  an  incongruous,  haphazard,  and  shapeless  jumble. 
It  is  but  another  proof  of  the  fact  that,  while  talent  cannot 
safely  ignore  what  is  called  technique,  genius  almost  can. 
Coleridge,  in  spite  of  his  formlessness,  remains  the  wisest 
man  who  ever  spoke  in  English  about  literature.  His  place 
is  that  of  an  oracle  among  controversialists. 

Even  so,  Biographia  Literaria  is  a  disappointing  book. 
It  is  the  porch,  but  it  is  not  the  temple.  It  may  be  that,  in 
literary  criticism,  there  can  be  no  temple.  Literary  criti- 
cism is  in  its  nature  largely  an  incitement  to  enter,  a  hint 


THE  WISDOM  OF  COLERIDGE  125 

of  the  treasures  that  are  to  be  found  within.  Persons  who 
seek  rest  in  literary  orthodoxy  are  always  hoping  to  dis- 
cover written  upon  the  walls  of  the  porch  the  ten  com- 
mandments of  good  writing.  It  is  extremely  easy  to 
invent  ten  such  commandments — it  was  done  in  the  age 
of  Racine  and  in  the  age  of  Pope — but  the  wise  critic  knows 
that  in  literature  the  rules  are  less  important  than  the 
"  inner  light."  Hence,  criticism  at  its  highest  is  not  a 
theorist's  attempt  to  impose  iron  laws  on  writers :  it  is  an 
attempt  to  capture  the  secret  of  that  "  inner  light "  and  of 
those  who  possess  it  and  to  communicate  it  to  others.  It  is 
also  an  attempt  to  define  the  conditions  in  which  the  "  inner 
light  "  has  most  happily  manifested  itself,  and  to  judge 
new  writers  of  promise  according  to  the  measure  in  which 
they  have  been  true  to  the  spirit,  though  not  necessarily 
to  the  technicalities,  of  the  great  tradition.  Criticism,  then, 
is  not  the  Roman  father  of  good  writing:  it  is  the  disciple 
and  missionary  of  good  writing.  The  end  of  criticism  is 
less  law-giving  than  conversion.  It  teaches  not  the 
legalities,  but  the  love,  of  literature.  Biographia  Literaria 
does  this  in  its  most  admirable  parts  by  interesting  us  in 
Coleridge's  own  literary  beginnings,  by  emphasizing  the 
strong  sweetness  of  great  poets  in  contrast  to  the  petty 
animosities  of  little  ones,  by  pointing  out  the  signs  of  the 
miracle  of  genius  in  the  young  Shakespeare,  and  by  dis- 
engaging the  true  genius  of  Wordsworth  from  a  hundred 
extravagances  of  theory  and  practice.  Coleridge's  remarks 
on  the  irritability  of  minor  poets — "  men  of  undoubted 
talents,  but  not  of  genius,"  whose  tempers  are  "  rendered 
yet  more  irritable  by  their  desire  to  appear  men  of  genius  " 
— should  be  written  up  on  the  study  walls  of  everyone  com- 
mencing author.  His  description,  too,  of  his  period  as 
"  this  age  of  personality,  this  age  of  literary  and  political 
gossiping,  when  the  meanest  insects  are  worshipped  with 
a  sort  of  Egyptian  superstition,  if  only  the  brainless  head 
be  atoned  for  by  the  sting  of  personal  malignity  in  the 
tail,"  conveys  a  warning  to  writers  that  is  not  of  an  age 
but  for  all  time.  Coleridge  may  have  exaggerated  the 


126  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

"manly  hilarity"  and  "evenness  and  sweetness  of 
temper  "  of  men  of  genius.  But  there  is  no  denying  that, 
the  smaller  the  genius,  the  greater  is  the  spite  of  wounded 
self-love.  "  Experience  informs  us,"  as  Coleridge  says, 
"  that  the  first  defence  of  weak  minds  is  to  recriminate." 
As  for  Coleridge's  great  service  to  Wordsworth's  fame, 
it  was  that  of  a  gold- washer.  He  cleansed  it  from  all  that 
was  false  in  Wordsworth's  reaction  both  in  theory  and  in 
practice  against  "  poetic  diction."  Coleridge  pointed  out 
that  Wordsworth  had  misunderstood  the  ultimate  objec- 
tions to  eighteenth-century  verse.  The  valid  objection  to 
a  great  deal  of  eighteenth-century  verse  was  not,  he  showed, 
that  it  was  written  in  language  different  from  that  of  prose, 
but  that  it  consisted  of  "  translations  of  prose  thoughts 
into  poetic  language."  Coleridge  put  it  still  more  strongly, 
indeed,  when  he  said  that  "  the  language  from  Pope's 
translation  of  Homer  to  Darwin's  Temple  of  Nature  may, 
notwithstanding  some  illustrious  exceptions,  be  too  faith- 
fully characterized  as  claiming  to  be  poetical  for  no  better 
reason  than  that  it  would  be  intolerable  in  conversation  or 
in  prose."  Wordsworth,  unfortunately,  in  protesting 
against  the  meretricious  garb  of  mean  thoughts,  wished  to 
deny  verse  its  more  splendid  clothing  altogether.  If  we 
accepted  his  theories  we  should  have  to  condemn  his  Ode, 
the  greatest  of  his  sonnets,  and,  as  Coleridge  put  it, 
"  two-thirds  at  least  of  the  marked  beauties  of  his  poetry." 
The  truth  is,  Wordsworth  created  an  engine  that  was  in 
danger  of  destroying  not  only  Pope  but  himself.  Coleridge 
destroyed  the  engine  and  so  helped  to  save  Wordsworth. 
Coleridge  may,  in  his  turn,  have  gone  too  far  in  dividing 
language  into  three  groups — language  peculiar  to  poetry, 
language  peculiar  to  prose,  and  language  common  to  both, 
though  there  is  much  to  be  said  for  the  division;  but  his 
jealousy  for  the  great  tradition  in  language  was  the  jealousy 
of  a  sound  critic.  "  Language,"  he  declared,  "  is  the 
armoury  of  the  human  mind;  and  at  once  contains  the 
trophies  of  its  past,  and  the  weapons  of  its  future  con- 
quests." 


THE  WISDOM  OF  COLERIDGE  127 

He,  himself,  wrote  idly  enough  at  times:  he  did  not 
shrink  from  the  phrase,  "  literary  man,"  abominated  by 
•Mr.  Birrell.  But  he  rises  in  sentence  after  sentence  into 
the  great  manner,  as  when  he  declares: 

No  man  was  ever  yet  a  great  poet  without  being  at  the  same  time 
a  profound  philosopher.  For  poetry  is  the  blossom  and  the  fragrancy 
of  all  human  knowledge,  human  thoughts,  human  passions,  emotions, 
language. 

How  excellently,  again,  he  describes  Wordsworth's  early 
aim  as  being — 

to  give  the  charm  of  novelty  to  things  of  every  day,  and  to  excite  a 
feeling  analogous  to  the  supernatural  by  awakening  the  mind's  atten- 
tion from  the  lethargy  of  custom  and  directing  it  to  the  loveliness  and 
the  wonders  of  the  world  before  us. 

He  explains  Wordsworth's  gift  more  fully  in  another 
passage : 

It  was  the  union  of  deep  feeling  with  profound  thought,  the  fine 
balance  of  truth  in  observing,  with  the  imaginative  faculty  in  modifying 
the  objects  observed,  and,  above  all,  the  original  gift  of  spreading  the 
tone,  the  atmosphere,  and  with  it  the  depth  and  height  of  the  ideal 
world,  around  forms,  incidents,  and  situations,  of  which,  for  the 
common  view,  custom  had  bedimmed  all  the  lustre,  had  dried  up  the 
sparkle  and  the  dew-drops. 

Coleridge's  censures  on  Wordsworth,  on  the  other  hand, 
such  as  that  on  The  Daffodil,  may  not  all  be  endorsed  by 
us  to-day.  But  in  the  mass  they  have  the  insight  of  genius, 
as  when  he  condemns  "  the  approximation  to  what  might 
be  called  mental  bombast,  as  distinguished  from  verbal." 
His  quotations  of  great  passages,  again,  are  the  very  flower 
of  good  criticism. 

Mr.  George  Sampson's  editorial  selection  from  Bio- 
graphia  Literaria  and  his  pleasant  as  well  as  instructive 
notes  give  one  a  new  pleasure  in  re-reading  this  classic  of 
critical  literature.  The  "  quale-quare-quidditive  "  chapters 
have  been  removed,  and  Wordsworth's  revolutionary  pref- 
aces and  essays  given  in  their  place.  In  its  new  form, 
Biographia  Literaria.  may  not  be  the  best  book  that  could  be 


128  TEE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

written,  but  there  is  good  reason  for  believing  that  it  is  the 
best  book  that  has  been  written  on  poetry  in  the  English 
tongue. 

(2)    COLERIDGE   AS    A    TALKER 

Coleridge's  talk  resembles  the  movements  of  one  of  the 
heavenly  bodies.  It  moves  luminously  on  its  way  without 
impediment,  without  conflict.  When  Dr.  Johnson  talks, 
half  our  pleasure  is  due  to  our  sense  of  conflict.  His  sen- 
tences are  knobby  sticks.  We  love  him  as  a  good  man 
playing  the  bully  even  more  than  as  a  wise  man  talk- 
ing common  sense.  He  is  one  of  the  comic  characters  in 
literature.  He  belongs,  in  his  eloquence,  to  the  same 
company  as  Falstaff  and  Micawber.  He  was,  to  some 
extent,  the  invention  of  a  Scottish  humourist  named  Bos- 
well.  "  Burke,"  we  read  in  Coleridge's  Table  Talk,  "  said 
and  wrote  more  than  once  that  he  thought  Johnson  greater 
in  talking  than  writing,  and  greater  in  Boswell  than  in  real 
life."  Coleridge's  conversation  is  not  to  the  same  extent 
a  coloured  expression  of  personality.  He  speaks  out  of  the 
solitude  of  an  oracle  rather  than  struts  upon  the  stage  of 
good  company,  a  master  of  repartees.  At  his  best,  he 
becomes  the  mouthpiece  of  universal  wisdom,  as  when  he 
says :  "  To  most  men  experience  is  like  the  stern  lights  of 
a  ship,  which  illuminate  only  the  track  it  has  passed."  He 
can  give  us  in  a  sentence  the  central  truth  of  politics,  recon- 
ciling what  is  good  in  Individualism  with  what  is  good  in 
Socialism  in  a  score  or  so  of  words : 

That  is  the  most  excellent  state  of  society  in  which  the  patriotism 
of  the  citizen  ennobles,  but  does  not  merge,  the  individual  energy  of 
the  man. 

And  he  can  give  common  sense  as  well  as  wisdom 
imaginative  form,  as  in  the  sentence : 

Truth  is  a  good  dog;  but  beware  of  barking  too  close  to  the  heels 
of  error,  lest  you  get  your  brains  knocked  out. 

"  I  am,  by  the  law  of  my  nature,  a  reasoner,"  said 
Coleridge,  and  he  explained  that  he  did  not  mean  by  this 


THE  WISDOM  OF  COLERIDGE  129 

"  an  arguer."  He  was  a  discoverer  of  order,  of  laws,  of 
causes,  not  a  controversialist.  He  sought  after  principles, 
whether  in  politics  or  literature.  He  quarrelled  with 
Gibbon  because  his  Decline  and  Fall  was  "  little  else  but 
a  disguised  collection  of  ...  splendid  anecdotes"  instead 
of  a  philosophic  search  for  the  ultimate  causes  of  the  ruin 
of  the  Roman  Empire.  Coleridge  himself  formulated  these 
causes  in  sentences  that  are  worth  remembering  at  a  time 
when  we  are  debating  whether  the  world  of  the  future  is  to 
be  a  vast  boxing  ring  of  empires  or  a  community  of  indepen- 
dent nations.  He  said: 

The  true  key  to  the  declension  of  the  Roman  Empire — which  is 
not  to  be  found  in  all  Gibbon's  immense  work — may  be  stated  in  two 
words :  the  imperial  character  overlaying,  and  finally  destroying,  the 
national  character.  Rome  under  Trajan  was  an  empire  without  a 
nation. 

One  must  not  claim  too  much  for  Coleridge,  however. 
He  was  a  seer  with  his  head  among  the  stars,  but  he  was 
also  a  human  being  with  uneven  gait,  stumbling  amid 
infirmities,  prejudices,  and  unhappinesses.  He  himself 
boasted  in  a  delightful  sentence : 

For  one  mercy  I  owe  thanks  beyond  all  utterance — that,  with  all 
my  gastric  and  bowel  distempers,  my  head  hath  ever  been  like  the 
head  of  a  mountain  in  blue  air  and  sunshine. 

It  is  to  be  feared  that  Coleridge's  "  gastric  and  bowel 
distempers "  had  more  effect  on  his  head  than  he  was 
aware  of.  Like  other  men,  he  often  spoke  out  of  a  heart 
full  of  grievances.  He  uttered  the  bitterness  of  an  un- 
happily married  dyspeptic  when  he  said :  "  The  most 
happy  marriage  I  can  picture  or  image  to  myself  would  be 
the  union  of  a  deaf  man  to  a  blind  woman."  It  is  amusing 
to  reflect  that  one  of  the  many  books  which  he  wished  to 
write  was  "  a  book  on  the  duties  of  women,  more  especially 
to  their  husbands."  One  feels,  again,  that  in  his  defence 
of  the  egoism  of  the  great  reformers,  he  was  apologizing 
for  a  vice  of  his  own  rather  than  making  an  impersonal 
statement  of  truth.  "  How  can  a  tall  man  help  thinking 


130  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

of  his  size,"  he  asked,  "  when  dwarfs  are  constantly  stand- 
ing on  tiptoe  beside  him?"  The  personal  note  that  occa- 
sionally breaks  in  upon  the  oracular  rhythm  of  the  Table 
Talk,  however,  is  a  virtue  in  literature,  even  if  a  lapse  in 
philosophy.  The  crumbs  of  a  great  man's  autobiography 
are  no  less  precious  than  the  crumbs  of  his  wisdom.  There 
are  moods  in  which  one  prefers  his  egotism  to  his  great 
thoughts.  It  is  pleasant  to  hear  Coleridge  boasting: 
"The  Ancient  Mariner  cannot  be  imitated,  nor  the  poem 
Love.  They  may  be  excelled;  they  are  not  imitable." 
One  is  amused  to  know  that  he  succeeded  in  offending  Lamb 
on  one  occasion  by  illustrating  "  the  cases  of  vast  genius 
in  proportion  to  talent  and  the  predominance  of  talent  in 
conjunction  with  genius  in  the  persons  of  Lamb  and  him- 
self." It  is  amusing,  too,  to  find  that,  while  Wordsworth 
regarded  The  Ancient  Mariner  as  a  dangerous  drag  on 
the  popularity  of  Lyrical  Ballads,  Coleridge  looked  on  his 
poem  as  the  feature  that  had  sold  the  greatest  number  of 
the  copies  of  the  book.  It  is  only  fair  to  add  that  in  taking 
this  view  he  spoke  not  self -complacently,  but  humorously: 

I  was  told  by  Longmans  that  the  greater  part  of  the  Lyrical  Ballads 
had  been  sold  to  seafaring  men,  who,  having  heard  of  the  Ancient 
Mariner,  concluded  that  it  was  a  naval  song-book,  or,  at  all  events, 
that  it  had  some  relation  to  nautical  matters. 

Of  autobiographical  confessions  there  are  not  so  many  in 
Table  Talk  as  one  would  like.  At  the  same  time,  there  are 
one  or  two  which  throw  light  on  the  nature  of  Coleridge's 
imagination.  We  get  an  idea  of  one  of  the  chief  differ- 
ences between  the  poetry  of  Coleridge  and  the  poetry  of 
Wordsworth  when  we  read  the  confession: 

I  had  the  perception  of  individual  images  very  strong,  but  a  dim 
one  of  the  relation  of  place.  I  remember  the  man  or  the  tree,  but 
where  I  saw  them  I  mostly  forget. 

The  nephew  who  collected  Coleridge's  talk  declared  that 
there  was  no  man  whom  he  would  more  readily  have  chosen 
as  a  guide  in  morals,  but  "  I  would  not  take  him  as  a  guide 
through  streets  or  fields  or  earthly  roads."  The  author 


THE  WISDOM  OF  COLERIDGE  131 

of  Kubla  Khan  asserted  still  more  strongly  on  another  occa- 
sion his  indifference  to  locality : 

Dear  Sir  Walter  Scott  and  myself  were  exact  but  harmonious 
opposites  in  this — that  every  old  ruin,  hill,  river,  or  tree  called  up  in 
his  mind  a  host  of  historical  or  biographical  associations,  just  as  a 
bright  pan  of  brass,  when  beaten,  is  said  to  attract  the  swarming 
bees ;  whereas,  for  myself,  notwithstanding  Dr.  Johnson,  I  believe  I 
should  walk  over  the  plain  of  Marathon  without  taking  more  interest 
in  it  than  in  any  other  plain  of  similar  features.  Yet  I  receive  as 
much  pleasure  in  reading  the  account  of  the  battle,  in  Herodotus,  as 
anyone  can.  Charles  Lamb  wrote  an  essay  on  a  man  who  lived  in 
past  time :  I  thought  of  adding  another  to  it  on  one  who  lived  not 
in  time  at  all,  past,  present,  or  future — but  beside  or  collaterally. 

Some  of  Coleridge's  other  memories  are  of  a  more  trifling 
and  amusing  sort.  He  recalls,  for  instance,  the  occasion 
of  his  only  flogging  at  school.  He  had  gone  to  a  shoe- 
maker and  asked  to  be  taken  on  as  an  apprentice.  The 
shoemaker,  "  being  an  honest  man,"  had  at  once  told  the 
boy's  master: 

Bo  wye  r  asked  me  why  I  had  made  myself  such  a  fool?  to  which  I 
answered,  that  I  had  a  great  desire  to  be  a  shoemaker,  and  that  I 
hated  the  thought  of  being  a  clergyman.  "Why  so?"  said  he.  "Be- 
cause, to  tell  you  the  truth,  sir,"  said  I,  "I  am  an  infidel!"  For  this, 
without  more  ado,  Bowyer  flogged  me — wisely,  as  I  think — soundly, 
as  I  know.  Any  whining  or  sermonizing  would  have  gratified  my 
vanity,  and  confirmed  me  in  my  absurdity;  as  it  was,  I  laughed  at, 
and  got  heartily  ashamed  of  my  folly. 

Among  the  reminiscences  of  Coleridge  no  passage  is 
more  famous  than  that  in  which  he  relates  how,  as  he  was 
walking  in  a  lane  near  Highgate  one  day,  a  "  loose,  slack, 
not  well-dressed  youth  "  was  introduced  to  him : 

It  was  Keats.  He  was  introduced  to  me,  and  stayed  a  minute  or 
so.  After  he  had  left  us  a  little  way,  he  came  back,  and  said:  "Let  me 
carry  away  the  memory,  Coleridge,  of  having  pressed  your  hand !  " 

"  There  is  death  in  that  hand,"  I  said  to  ,  when  Keats  was  gone ; 

yet  this  was,  I  believe,  before  the  consumption  showed  itself  distinctly. 

Another  famous  anecdote  relates  to  the  time  at  which 
Coleridge,  like  Wordsworth,  carried  the  fires  of  the  French 
Revolution  about  him  into  the  peace  of  the  West  Country. 


132  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

Speaking  of  a  fellow-disciple  of  the  liberty  of  those  days, 
Coleridge  afterwards  said: 

John  Thelwall  had  something  very  good  about  him.  We  were  once 
sitting  in  a  beautiful  recess  in  the  Quantocks,  when  I  said  to  him: 
"  Citizen  John,  this  is  a  fine  place  to  talk  treason  in !  "  "  Nay !  Citizen 
Samuel,"  replied  he,  "  it  is  rather  a  place  to  make  a  man  forget  that 
there  is  any  necessity  for  treason !  " 

Is  there  any  prettier  anecdote  in  literary  history? 

Besides  the  impersonal  wisdom  and  the  personal  anec- 
dotes of  the  Table  Talk,  however,  there  are  a  great  number 
of  opinions  which  show  us  Coleridge  not  as  a  seer,  but  as  a 
"  character  " — a  crusty  gentleman,  every  whit  as  ready  to 
express  an  antipathy  as  a  principle.  He  shared  Dr.  John- 
son's quarrel  with  the  Scots,  and  said  of  them : 

I  have  generally  found  a  Scotchman  with  a  little  literature  very 
disagreeable.  He  is  a  superficial  German  or  a  dull  Frenchman.  The 
Scotch  will  attribute  merit  to  people  of  any  nation  rather  than  the 
English. 

He  had  no  love  for  Jews,  or  Dissenters,  or  Catholics, 
and  anticipated  Carlyle's  hostility  to  the  emancipation  of 
the  negroes.  He  raged  against  the  Reform  Bill,  Catholic 
Emancipation,  and  the  education  of  the  poor  in  schools. 
He  was  indignant  with  Belgium  for  claiming  national 
independence.  One  cannot  read  much  of  his  talk  about 
politics  without  amazement  that  so  wise  a  man  should  have 
been  so  frequently  a  fool.  At  the  same  time,  he  generally 
remained  an  original  fool.  He  never  degenerated  into  a 
mere  partisan.  He  might  be  deceived  by  reactionary  ideals, 
but  he  was  not  taken  in  by  reactionary  leaders.  He  was 
no  more  capable  than  Shelley  of  mistaking  Castlereagh  for 
a  great  man,  and  he  did  not  join  in  the  glorification  of 
Pitt.  Like  Dr.  Johnson,  he  could  be  a  Tory  without  feel- 
ing that  it  was  necessary  at  all  costs  to  bully  Ireland. 
Coleridge,  indeed,  went  so  far  as  to  wish  to  cut  the  last 
link  with  Ireland  as  the  only  means  of  saving  England. 
Discussing  the  Irish  question,  he  said : 

I  am  quite  sure  that  no  dangers  are  to  be  feared  by  England  from 
the  disannexing  and  independence  of  Ireland  at  all  comparable  with 


THE  WISDOM  OF  COLERIDGE  133 

the  evils  which  have  been,  and  will  yet  be,  caused  to  England  by  the 
Union.  We  have  never  received  one  particle  of  advantage  from  our 
association  with  Ireland.  .  .  .  Mr.  Pitt  has  received  great  credit  for 
effecting  the  Union ;  but  I  believe  it  will  sooner  or  later  be  discovered 
that  the  manner  in  which,  and  the  terms  upon  which,  he  effected  it 
made  it  the  most  fatal  blow  that  ever  was  levelled  against  the  peace 
and  prosperity  of  England.  From  it  came  the  Catholic  Bill.  From 
the  Catholic  Bill  has  come  this  Reform  Bill!  And  what  next? 

When  one  thinks  of  the  injury  that  the  subjection  of  Ire- 
land has  done  the  English  name  in  Arnerica,  in  Russia,  in 
Australia,  and  elsewhere  in  quite  recent  times,  one  can 
hardly  deny  that  on  this  matter  Coleridge  was  a  sound 
prophet. 

It  is  the  literary  rather  than  the  political  opinions,  how- 
ever, that  will  bring  every  generation  of  readers  afresh  to 
Coleridge's  Table  Talk.  No  man  ever  talked  better  in  a 
few  sentences  on  Shakespeare,  Sterne,  and  the  tribe  of 
authors.  One  may  not  agree  with  Coleridge  in  regarding 
Jeremy  Taylor  as  one  of  the  four  chief  glories  of  English 
literature,  or  in  thinking  Southey's  style  "  next  door  to 
faultless."  But  one  listens  to  his  obiter  dicta  eagerly  as 
the  sayings  of  one  of  the  greatest  minds  that  have  interested 
themselves  in  the  criticism  of  literature.  There  are  tedious 
pages  in  Table  Talk,  but  these  are,  for  the  most  part,  con- 
cerned with  theology.  On  the  whole,  the  speech  of  Cole- 
ridge was  golden.  Even  the  leaden  parts  are  interesting 
because  they  are  Coleridge's  lead.  One  wishes  the  theology 
was  balanced,  however,  by  a  few  more  glimpses  of  his 
lighter  interests,  such  as  we  find  in  the  passage :  "  Never 
take  an  iambus  for  a  Christian  name.  A  trochee,  or  tri- 
brach, will  do  very  well.  Edith  and  Rotha  are  my  favourite 
names  for  women."  What  we  want  most  of  all  in  table 
talk  is  to  get  an  author  into  the  confession  album.  Cole- 
ridge's Table  Talk  would  have  stood  a  worse  chance  of  im- 
mortality were  it  not  for  the  fact  that  he  occasionally  came 
down  out  of  the  pulpit  and  babbled. 


XIII.— TENNYSON:    A  TEMPORARY  CRITICISM 

IF  Tennyson's  reputation  has  diminished,  it  is  not  that  it 
has  fallen  before  hostile  criticism :  it  has  merely  faded 
through  time.  Perhaps  there  was  never  an  English  poet 
who  loomed  so  large  to  his  own  age  as  Tennyson — who 
represented  his  contemporaries  with  the  same  passion  and 
power.  Pope  was  sufficiently  representative  of  his  age, 
but  his  age  meant,  by  comparison,  a  limited  and  aristocratic 
circle.  Byron  represented  and  shocked  his  age  by  turns. 
Tennyson,  on  the  other  hand,  was  as  close  to  the  educated 
middle-class  men  and  women  of  his  time  as  the  family 
clergyman.  That  is  why,  inevitably,  he  means  less  to  us 
than  he  did  to  them.  That  he  was  ahead  of  his  age  on 
many  points  on  which  this  could  not  be  said  of  the  family 
clergyman  one  need  not  dispute.  He  was  a  kind  of  "  new 
theologian."  He  stood,  like  Dean  Farrar,  for  the  larger 
hope  and  various  other  heresies.  Every  representative 
man  is  ahead  of  his  age — a  little,  but  not  enough  to  be 
beyond  the  reach  of  the  sympathies  of  ordinary  people.  It 
may  be  objected  that  Tennyson  is  primarily  an  artist,  not 
a  thinker,  and  that  he  should  be  judged  not  by  his  message 
but  by  his  song.  But  his  message  and  his  song  sprang 
from  the  same  vision — a  vision  of  the  world  seen,  not  sub 
specie  ceternitatis,  but  sub  specie  the  reign  of  Queen  Vic- 
toria. Before  we  appreciate  Tennyson's  real  place  in 
literature,  we  must  frankly  recognize  the  fact  that  his  muse 
wore  a  crinoline.  The  great  mass  of  his  work  bears  its  date 
stamped  upon  it  as  obviously  almost  as  a  copy  of  The 
Times.  How  topical,  both  in  mood  and  phrasing,  are 
such  lines  as  those  in  Locksley  Hall: 

Then  her  cheek  was  pale,  and  thinner  than  should  be  for  one  so  young, 
And  her  eyes  on  all  my  motions  with  a  mute  observance  hung. 
And  I  said  "  My  cousin  Amy,  speak,  and  speak  the  truth  to  me, 
Trust  me,  cousin,  all  the  current  of  my  being  sets  to  thee. 

134 


TENNYSON:  A  TEMPORARY  CRITICISM       135 

One  would  not,  of  course,  quote  these  lines  as  typical  of 
Tennyson's  genius.  I  think,  however,  they  may  be  fairly 
quoted  as  lines  suggesting  the  mid- Victorian  atmosphere 
that  clings  round  all  but  his  greatest  work.  They  bring 
before  our  minds  the  genteel  magazine  illustrations  of  other 
days.  They  conjure  up  a  world  of  charming,  vapid  faces, 
where  there  is  little  life  apart  from  sentiment  and  rhetoric. 
Contrast  such  a  poem  as  Locksley  Hall  with  TJie  Flight  of 
the  Dutchess.  Each  contains  at  once  a  dramatization  of 
human  relations,  and  the  statement  of  a  creed.  The  human 
beings  in  Browning's  poem,  however,  are  not  mere  shadows 
out  of  old  magazines;  they  are  as  real  as  the  men  and 
women  in  the  portraits  of  the  masters,  as  real  as  ourselves. 
Similarly,  in  expressing  his  thought,  Browning  gives  it 
imaginative  dignity  as  philosophy,  while  Tennyson  writes 
what  is  after  all  merely  an  exalted  leading  article.  There 
is  more  in  common  between  Tennyson  and  Lytton  than  is 
generally  realized.  Both  were  fond  of  windy  words.  They 
were  slaves  of  language  to  almost  as  great  an  extent  as 
Swinburne.  One  feels  that  too  often  phrases  like  "  moor 
and  fell"  and  "bower  and  hall"  were  mere  sounding 
substitutes  for  a  creative  imagination.  I  have  heard  it 
argued  that  the  lines  in  Maud : 

All  night  have  the  roses  heard 
The  flute,  violin,  bassoon ; 

introduce  a  curiously  inappropriate  instrument  into  a  ball- 
room orchestra  merely  for  the  sake  of  euphony.  The  mis- 
take about  the  bassoon  is  a  small  one,  and  is,  I  suppose, 
borrowed  from  Coleridge,  but  it  is  characteristic. 

Tennyson  was  by  no  means  the  complete  artist  that  for 
years  he  was  generally  accepted  as  being.  He  was  an 
artist  of  lines  rather  than  of  poems.  He  seldom  wrote  a 
poem  which  seemed  to  spring  full-armed  from  the  imagina- 
tion as  the  great  poems  of  the  world  do.  He  built  them  up 
haphazard,  as  Thackeray  wrote  his  novels.  They  are  full 
of  sententious  padding  and  prettiness,  and  the  wordiness 
is  not  merely  a  philosopher's  vacuous  babbling  in  his  sleep, 


136  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

as  so  much  of  Wordsworth  is;  it  is  the  word-spinning  of  a 
man  who  loves  words  more  than  people,  or  philosophy,  or 
things.  Let  us  admit  at  once  that  when  Tennyson  is  word 
perfect  he  takes  his  place  among  the  immortals.  One  may 
be  convinced  that  the  bulk  of  his  work  is  already  as  dead 
as  the  bulk  of  Longfellow's  work.  But  in  his  great  poems 
he  awoke  to  the  vision  of  romance  in  its  perfect  form,  and 
expressed  it  perfectly.  He  did  this  in  Ulysses,  which  comes 
nearer  a  noble  perfection,  perhaps,  than  anything  else  he 
ever  wrote.  One  can  imagine  the  enthusiasm  of  some  lit- 
erary discoverer  many  centuries  hence,  when  Tennyson  is 
as  little  known  as  Donne  was  fifty  years  ago,  coming  upon 
lines  hackneyed  for  us  by  much  quotation : 

The  lights  begin  to  twinkle  from  the  rocks : 

The  long  day  wanes :  the  slow  moon  climbs :  the  deep 

Moans  round  with  many  voices.    Come,  my  friends, 

'Tis  not  too  late  to  seek  a  newer  world. 

Push  off,  and  sitting  well  in  order  smite 

The  sounding  furrows ;  for  my  purpose  holds 

To  sail  beyond  the  sunset  and  the  baths 

Of  all  the  western  stars,  until  I  die. 

It  may  be  that  the  gulfs  will  wash  us  down ; 

It  may  be  we  shall  touch  the  Happy  Isles, 

And  see  the  great  Achilles,  whom  we  knew. 

There,  even  if  you  have  not  the  stalwart  imagination  which 
makes  Browning's  people  alive,  you  have  a  most  beautiful 
fancy  illustrating  an  old  story.  One  of  the  most  beautiful 
lines  Tennyson  ever  wrote : 

The  horns  of  Elfland  faintly  blowing, 

has  the  same  suggestion  of  having  been  forged  from  the 
gold  of  the  world's  romance. 

Tennyson's  art  at  its  best,  however,  and  in  these  two 
instances  is  art  founded  upon  art,  not  art  founded  upon  life. 
We  used  to  be  asked  to  admire  the  vivid  observation  shown 
in  such  lines  as : 

More  black  than  ashbuds  in  the  front  of  March ; 

and  it  is  undoubtedly  interesting  to  learn  that  Tennyson 
had  a  quick  eye  for  the  facts  of  nature.  But  such  lines, 


TENNYSON:  A  TEMPORARY  CRITICISM       137 

however  accurate,  do  not  make  a  man  a  poet.    It  is  in  his 
fine  ornamental  moods  that  Tennyson  means  most  to  our 
imaginations  nowadays — in  the  moods  of  such  lines  as : 
Now  droops  the  milk-white  peacock  like  a  ghost. 

The  truth  is,  Tennyson,  with  all  his  rhetoric  and  with  all 
his  prosaic  Victorian  opinions,  was  an  aesthete  in  the  im- 
mortal part  of  him  no  less  than  were  Rossetti  and  Swin- 
burne. He  seemed  immense  to  his  contemporaries,  because 
he  put  their  doubts  and  fears  into  music,  and  was  master 
of  the  fervid  rhetoric  of  the  new  gospel  of  Imperial- 
ism. They  did  not  realize  that  great  poetry  cannot  be 
founded  on  a  basis  of  perishable  doubts  and  perishable 
gospels.  It  was  enough  for  them  to  feel  that  In  Memoriam 
gave  them  soothing  anchorage  and  shelter  from  the 
destructive  hurricanes  of  science.  It  was  enough  for  them 
to  thrill  to  the  public-speech  poetry  of  Of  old  sat  Freedom 
on  the  Heights,  the  patriotic  triumph  of  The  Relief  of 
Lucknow,  the  glorious  contempt  for  foreigners  exhibited  in 
his  references  to  "  the  red  fool-fury  of  the  Seine."  Is  it 
any  wonder  that  during  a  great  part  of  his  life  Tennyson 
was  widely  regarded  as  not  only  a  poet,  but  a  teacher  and 
a  statesman?  His  sneering  caricature  of  Bright  as  the 
"  broad-brimmed  hawker  of  holy  things "  should  have 
made  it  clear  that  in  politics  he  was  but  a  party  man,  and 
that  his  political  intelligence  was  commonplace. 

He  was  too  deficient  in  the  highest  kind  of  imagination 
and  intellect  to  achieve  the  greatest  things.  He  seldom 
or  never  stood  aloof  from  his  own  time,  as  Wordsworth 
did  through  his  philosophic  imagination,  as  Keats  did 
through  his  aesthetic  imagination,  as  Browning  did  through 
his  dramatic  imagination.  He  wore  a  poetical  cloak,  and 
avoided  the  vulgar  crowd  physically;  he  had  none  of 
Browning's  taste  for  tea-parties.  But  Browning  had  not 
the  tea-party  imagination;  Tennyson,  in  a  great  degree, 
had.  He  preached  excellent  virtues  to  his  time;  but  they 
were  respectable  rather  than  spiritual  virtues.  Thus,  The 
Idylls  of  the  King  have  become  to  us  mere  ancient  fashion- 


138  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

plates  of  the  virtues,  while  the  moral  power  of  The  Ring 
and  the  Book  is  as  commanding  to-day  as  in  the  year  in 
which  the  poem  was  first  published. 

It  is  all  the  more  surprising  that  no  good  selection  from 
Tennyson  has  yet  appeared.  His  "  complete  works  "  con- 
tain so  much  that  is  ephemeral  and  uninspired  as  to  be  a 
mere  book  of  reference  on  our  shelves.  When  will  some 
critic  do  for  him  what  Matthew  Arnold  did  for  Words- 
worth, and  separate  the  gold  from  the  dross — do  it  as  well 
as  Matthew  Arnold  did  it  for  Wordsworth  ?  Such  a  volume 
would  be  far  thinner  than  the  Wordsworth  selection.  But 
it  would  entitle  Tennyson  to  a  much  higher  place  among 
the  poets  than  in  these  years  of  the  reaction  he  is  generally 
given. 


XIV.— THE  POLITICS  OF  SWIFT  AND 
SHAKESPEARE 

(l)    SWIFT 

THERE  are  few  greater  ironies  in  history  than  that  the 
modern  Conservatives  should  be  eager  to  claim  Swift  as 
one  of  themselves.  One  finds  even  the  Morning  Post — 
which  someone  has  aptly  enough  named  the  Morning 
Prussian — cheerfully  counting  the  author  of  A  Voyage  to 
Houyhnhntns  in  the  list  of  sound  Tories.  It  is  undeniable 
that  Swift  wrote  pamphlets  for  the  Tory  Party  of  his 
day.  A  Whig,  he  turned  from  the  Whigs  of  Queen  Anne 
in  disgust,  and  carried  the  Tory  label  for  the  rest  of  his 
life.  If  we  consider  realities  rather  than  labels,  however, 
what  do  we  find  were  the  chief  political  ideals  for  which 
Swift  stood?  His  politics,  as  every  reader  of  his  pamphlets 
knows,  were,  above  all,  the  politics  of  a  pacifist  and  a  Home 
Ruler — the  two  things  most  abhorrent  to  the  orthodox  Tories 
of  our  own  time.  Swift  belonged  to  the  Tory  Party  at  one 
of  those  rare  periods  at  which  it  was  a  peace  party.  The 
Conduct  of  the  Allies  was  simply  a  demand  for  a  premature 
peace.  Worse  than  this,  it  was  a  pamphlet  against  Eng- 
land's taking  part  in  a  land-war  on  the  Continent  instead 
of  confining  herself  to  naval  operations.  "  It  was  the 
kingdom's  misfortune,"  wrote  Swift,  "  that  the  sea  was 
not  the  Duke  of  Maryborough's  element,  otherwise  the  whole 
force  of  the  war  would  infallibly  have  been  bestowed  there, 
infinitely  to  the  advantage  of  his  country."  Whether  Swift 
and  the  Tories  were  right  in  their  attack  on  Marlborough 
and  the  war  is  a  question  into  which  I  do  not  propose  to 
enter.  I  merely  wish  to  emphasize  the  fact  that  The  Con- 
duct of  the  Allies  was,  from  the  modern  Tory  point  of 
view,  not  merely  a  pacifist,  but  a  treasonable,  document. 
Were  anything  like  it  to  appear  nowadays,  it  would  be 

139 


140  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

suppressed  under  the  Defence  of  the  Realm  Act.  And 
that  Swift  was  a  hater  of  war,  not  merely  as  a  party  politi- 
cian, but  as  a  philosopher,  is  shown  by  the  discourse  on 
the  causes  of  war  which  he  puts  into  the  mouth  of  Gulliver 
when  the  latter  is  trying  to  convey  a  picture  of  human 
society  to  his  Houyhnhnm  master: 

Sometimes  the  quarrel  between  two  princes  is  to  decide  which  of 
them  shall  dispossess  a  third  of  his  dominions,  where  neither  of  them 
pretends  to  any  right.  Sometimes  one  prince  quarrelleth  with  another 
for  fear  the  other  should  quarrel  with  him.  Sometimes  a  war  is 
entered  upon  because  the  enemy  is  too  strong,  and  sometimes  because 
he  is  too  weak.  Sometimes  our  neighbours  want  the  things  which 
we  have,  or  have  the  things  which  we  want ;  and  we  both  fight  till  they 
take  ours  or  give  us  theirs.  It  is  a  very  justifiable  cause  of  a  war 
to  invade  a  country  after  the  people  have  been  wasted  by  famine, 
destroyed  by  pestilence  or  embroiled  by  factions  among  themselves. 
It  is  justifiable  to  enter  into  war  with  our  nearest  ally,  when  one  of 
his  towns  lies  convenient  for  us,  or  a  territory  of  land  that  would 
render  our  dominions  round  and  complete.  If  a  prince  sends  forces 
into  a  nation,  where  the  people  are  poor  and  ignorant,  he  may  lawfully 
put  half  of  them  to  death  or  make  slaves  of  the  rest,  in  order  fo 
civilize  and  reduce  them  from  their  barbarous  way  of  living. 

There  you  have  "  Kultur  "  wars,  and  "  white  man's  bur- 
den "  wars,  and  wars  for  "  places  of  strategic  importance," 
satirized  as  though  by  a  twentieth-century  humanitarian. 
When  the  Morning  Post  begins  to  write  leaders  in  the 
same  strain,  we  shall  begin  to  believe  that  Swift  was  a 
Tory  in  the  ordinary  meaning  of  the  word. 

As  for  Swift's  Irish  politics,  Mr.  Charles  Whibley,  like 
other  Conservative  writers,  attempts  to  gloss  over  their 
essential  Nationalism  by  suggesting  that  Swift  was  merely 
a  just  man  righteously  indignant  at  the  destruction  of  Irish 
manufactures.  At  least,  one  would  never  gather  from  the 
present  book  that  Swift  was  practically  the  father  of  the 
modern  Irish  demand  for  self-government.  Swift  was  an 
Irish  patriot  in  the  sense  in  which  Washington  was  an 
American  patriot.  Like  Washington,  he  had  no  quarrel 
with  English  civilization.  He  was  not  an  eighteenth-cen- 
tury Sinn  Feiner.  He  regarded  himself  as  a  colonist,  and 
his  Nationalism  was  Colonial  Nationalism.  As  such  he 


POLITICS  OF  SWIFT  AND  SHAKESPEARE    141 

was  the  forerunner  of  Grattan  and  Flood,  and  also,  in  a 
measure,  of  Parnell  and  Redmond.  While  not  a  Separatist, 
he  had  the  strongest  possible  objection  to  being  either  ruled 
or  ruined  from  London.  In  his  Short  View  of  the  State  of 
Ireland,  published  in  1728,  he  preached  the  whole  gospel 
of  Colonial  Nationalism  as  it  is  accepted  by  Irishmen  like 
Sir  Horace  Plunkett  to-day.  He  declared  that  one  of  the 
causes  of  a  nation's  thriving — 

...  is  by  being  governed  only  by  laws  made  with  their  own  consent, 
for  otherwise  they  are  not  a  free  people.  And,  therefore,  all  appeals 
for  justice,  or  applications  for  favour  or  preferment,  to  another  country 
are  so  many  grievous  impoverishments. 

He  said  of  the  Irish: 

We  are  in  the  condition  of  patients  who  have  physic  sent  to  them 
by  doctors  at  a  distance,  strangers  to  their  constitution  and  the  nature 
of  their  disease. 

In  the  Drapier's  Letters  he  denied  the  right  of  the  English 
Parliament  to  legislate  for  Ireland.  He  declared  that  all 
reason  was  on  the  side  of  Ireland's  being  free,  though 
power  and  the  love  of  power  made  for  Ireland's  servitude. 
"  The  arguments  on  both  sides,"  he  said  in  a  passage  which 
sums  up  with  perfect  irony  the  centuries-old  controversy 
between  England  and  Ireland,  were  "  invincible  " : 

For  in  reason  all  government  without  the  consent  of  the  governed 
is  slavery.  But,  in  fact,  eleven  men  well  armed  will  certainly  subdue 
one  single  man  in  his  shirt. 

It  would  be  interesting  to  know  how  the  modern  Tory, 
whose  gospel  is  the  gospel  of  the  eleven  men  well  armed, 
squares  this  with  Swift's  passionate  championship  of  the 
"  one  single  man  in  his  shirt."  One  wishes  very  earnestly 
that  the  Toryism  of  Swift  were  in  fact  the  Toryism  of  the 
modern  Conservative  party.  Had  it  been  so,  there  would 
have  been  no  such  thing  as  Carsonism  in  pre-war  England; 
and,  had  there  been  no  Carsonism,  one  may  infer  from 
Mr.  Gerard's  recent  revelations,  there  might  have  been  no 
European  war. 


142  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

Mr.  Whibley,  it  is  only  fair  to  say,  is  concerned  with 
Swift  as  a  man  of  letters  and  a  friend,  rather  than  with 
Swift  as  a  party  politician.  The  present  book  is  a  reprint 
of  the  Leslie  Stephen  lecture  which  he  delivered  at  Cam- 
bridge a  few  months  ago.  It  was  bound,  therefore,  to  be 
predominantly  literary  in  interest.  At  the  same  time,  Mr. 
Whibley's  political  bias  appears  both  in  what  he  says  and 
in  what  he  keeps  silent  about.  His  defence  of  Swift  against 
the  charge  of  misanthropy  is  a  defence  with  which  we  find 
ourselves  largely  in  agreement.  But  Mr.  Whibley  is  too 
single-minded  a  party  politician  to  be  able  to  defend  the 
Dean  without  clubbing  a  number  of  his  own  pet  antipathies 
in  the  process.  He  seems  to  think  that  the  only  alternative 
to  the  attitude  of  Dean  Swift  towards  humanity  is  the 
attitude  of  persons  who,  "  feigning  a  bland  and  general 
love  of  abtract  humanity  ...  wreak  a  wild  revenge 
upon  individuals."  He  apparently  believes  that  it  is 
impossible  for  one  human  being  to  wish  well  to  the  human 
race  in  general,  and  to  be  affectionate  to  John,  Peter  and 
Thomas  in  particular.  Here  are  some  of  Mr.  Whibley's 
rather  wild  comments  on  this  topic.  He  writes : 

We  know  well  enough  whither  universal  philanthropy  leads  us.  The 
Friend  of  Man  is  seldom  the  friend  of  men.  At  his  best  he  is  content 
with  a  moral  maxim,  and  buttons  up  his  pocket  in  the  presence  of 
poverty.  "I  give  thee  sixpence!  I  will  see  thee  damned  first!"  It 
is  not  for  nothing  that  Canning's  immortal  words  were  put  in  the 
mouth  of  the  Friend  of  Humanity,  who,  finding  that  he  cannot  turn 
the  Needy  Knife  Grinder  to  political  account,  give  him  kicks  for 
ha'pence,  and  goes  off  in  "  a  transport  of  Republican  enthusiasm." 
Such  is  the  Friend  of  Man  at  his  best. 

"  At  his  best  "  is  good.  It  makes  one  realize  that  Mr. 
Whibley  is  merely  playing  a  game  of  make-believe,  and 
playing  it  very  hard.  His  indictment  of  humanitarians 
has  about  as  much,  or  as  little,  basis  in  fact  as  would  an 
indictment  of  wives  or  seagulls  or  fields  of  corn.  One 
has  only  to  mention  Shelley  with  his  innumerable  per- 
sonal benevolences  to  set  Mr.  Whibley's  card-castle  of 
abuse  tumbling. 


POLITICS  OF  SWIFT  AND  SHAKESPEARE    143 

With  Mr.  Whibley's  general  view  of  Swift  as  opposed 
to  his  general  view  of  politics,  I  find  myself  for  the  most 
part  in  harmony.  I  doubt,  however,  whether  Swift  has 
been  pursued  in  his  grave  with  such  torrential  malignity 
as  Mr.  Whibley  imagines.  Thackeray's  denigration,  I 
admit,  takes  the  breath  away.  One  can  hardly  believe 
that  Thackeray  had  read  either  Swift's  writings  or  his 
life.  Of  course  he  had  done  so,  but  his  passion  for  the 
sentimental  graces  made  him  incapable  of  doing  justice 
to  a  genius  of  saturnine  realism  such  as  Swift's.  The  truth 
is,  though  Swift  was  among  the  staunchest  of  friends,  he 
is  not  among  the  most  sociable  of  authors.  His  writings 
are  seldom  in  the  vein  either  of  tenderness  or  of 
merriment.  We  know  of  the  tenderness  of  Swift  only 
from  a  rare  anecdote  or  from  the  prattle  of  the  Journal  to 
Stella.  As  for  his  laughter,  as  Mr.  Whibley  rightly 
points  out,  Pope  was  talking  nonsense  when  he  wrote  of 
Swift  as  laughing  and  shaking  in  Rabelais's  easy  chair. 
Swift's  humour  is  essentially  of  the  intellect.  He  laughs 
out  of  his  own  bitterness  rather  than  to  amuse  his  fellow- 
men.  As  Mr.  Whibley  says,  he  is  not  a  cynic.  He  is 
not  sufficiently  indifferent  for  that.  He  is  a  satirist,  a 
sort  of  perverted  and  suffering  idealist:  an  idealist  with 
the  cynic's  vision.  It  is  the  essential  nobleness  of  Swift's 
nature  which  makes  the  voyage  to  the  Houyhnhnms  a 
noble  and  not  a  disgusting  piece  of  literature.  There  are 
people  who  pretend  that  this  section  of  Gulliver's  Travels 
is  almost  too  terrible  for  sensitive  persons  to  read.  This  is 
sheer  affectation.  It  can  only  be  honestly  maintained  by 
those  who  believe  that  life  is  too  terrible  for  sensitive 
persons  to  live! 

(2)    SHAKESPEARE 

Mr.  Whibley  goes  through  history  like  an  electioneering 
bill-poster.  He  plasters  up  his  election-time  shrillnesses 
not  only  on  Fox's  House  of  Commons  but  on  Shake- 
speare's Theatre.  He  is  apparently  interested  in  men  of 


144  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

genius  chiefly  as  regards  their  attitude  to  his  electioneer- 
ing activities.  Shakespeare,  he  seems  to  imagine,  was 
the  sort  of  person  who  would  have  asked  for  nothing 
better  as  a  frieze  in  his  sitting-room  in  New  Place  than 
a  scroll  bearing  in  huge  letters  some  such  motto  as 
"  Vote  for  Podgkins  and  Down  with  the  Common 
People "  or  "  Vote  for  Podgkins  and  No  League  of 
Nations."  Mr.  Whibley  thinks  Shakespeare  was  like 
that,  and  so  he  exalts  Shakespeare.  He  has,  I  do  not 
doubt,  read  Shakespeare,  but  that  has  made  no  difference. 
He  would  clearly  have  taken  much  the  same  view  of 
Shakespeare  if  he  had  never  read  him.  To  be  great,  said 
Emerson,  is  to  be  misunderstood.  To  be  great  is  assuredly 
to  be  misunderstood  by  Mr.  Whibley. 

I  do  not  think  it  is  doing  an  injustice  to  Mr.  Whibley 
to  single  out  the  chapter  on  "  Shakespeare :  Patriot  and 
Tory  "  as  the  most  representative  in  his  volume  of  Political 
Portraits.  It  would  be  unjust  if  one  were  to  suggest  that 
Mr.  Whibley  could  write  nothing  better  than  this.  His 
historical  portraits  are  often  delightful  as  the  work  of  a 
clever  illustrator,  even  if  we  cannot  accept  them  as  portraits. 
Those  essays  in  which  he  keeps  himself  out  of  the  picture 
and  eschews  ideas  most  successfully  attract  us  as  coming 
from  the  hand  of  a  skilful  writer.  His  studies  of  Claren- 
don, Metternich,  Napoleon  and  Melbourne  are  all  of  them 
good  entertainment.  If  I  comment  on  the  Shakespeare 
essay  rather  than  on  these,  it  is  because  here  more  than 
anywhere  else  in  the  book  the  author's  skill  as  a  portrait- 
painter  is  put  to  the  test.  Here  he  has  to  depend  almost 
exclusively  on  his  imagination,  intelligence,  and  knowledge 
of  human  nature.  Here,  where  there  are  scarcely  any 
epigrams  or  anecdotes  to  quote,  a  writer  must  reveal  whether 
he  is  an  artist  and  a  critic,  or  a  pedestrian  intelligence  with 
the  trick  of  words.  Mr.  Whibley,  I  fear,  comes  badly  off 
from  the  test.  One  does  not  blame  him  for  having  written 
on  the  theme  that  "  Shakespeare,  being  a  patriot,  was  a 
Tory  also."  It  would  be  easy  to  conceive  a  scholarly  and 
amusing  study  of  Shakespeare  on  these  lines.  Whitman 


POLITICS  OF  SWIFT  AND  SHAKESPEARE    145 

maintained  that  there  is  much  in  Shakespeare  to  offend 
the  democratic  mind ;  and  there  is  no  reason  why  an  intel- 
ligent Tory  should  not  praise  Shakespeare  for  what  Whit- 
man deplored  in  him.  There  is  every  reason,  however, 
why  the  portraiture  of  Shakespeare  as  a  Tory,  if  it  is  to  be 
done,  should  be  done  with  grace,  intelligence,  and  sureness 
of  touch.  Mr.  Whibley  throws  all  these  qualifications  to 
the  winds,  especially  the  second.  The  proof  of  Shakespeare's 
Toryism,  for  instance,  which  he  draws  from  Troilus  and 
Cressida,*  is  based  on  a  total  misunderstanding  of  the 
famous  and  simple  speech  of  Ulysses  about  the  necessity  of 
observing  "degree,  priority  and  place."  Mr.  Whibley, 
plunging  blindly  about  in  Tory  blinkers,  imagines  that  in 
this  speech  Ulysses,  or  rather  Shakespeare,  is  referring  to 
the  necessity  of  keeping  the  democracy  in  its  place.  "  Might 
he  not,"  he  asks,  "  have  written  these  prophetic  lines  with 
his  mind's  eye  upon  France  of  the  Terror  or  upon  modern 
Russia?  "  Had  Mr.  Whibley  read  the  play  with  that  small 
amount  of  self-forgetfulness  without  which  no  man  has 
ever  yet  been  able  to  appreciate  literature,  he  would  have 
discovered  that  it  is  the  unruliness  not  of  the  democracy  but 
of  the  aristocracy  against  which  Ulysses — or,  if  you  prefer 
it,  Shakespeare — inveighs  in  this  speech.  The  speech  is 
aimed  at  the  self-will  and  factiousness  of  Achilles  and  his 
disloyalty  to  Agamemnon.  If  there  are  any  moderns  who 
come  under  the  noble  lash  of  Ulysses,  they  must  be  sought 
for  not  among  either  French  or  Russian  revolutionists,  but 
in  the  persons  of  such  sound  Tories  as  Sir  Edward  Carson 
and  such  sound  patriots  as  Mr.  Lloyd  George.  It  is  tol- 
erably certain  that  neither  Ulysses  nor  Shakespeare  foresaw 
Sir  Edward  Carson's  escapades  or  Mr.  Lloyd  George's 
insurbordinate  career  as  a  member  of  Mr.  Asquith's  Cabinet. 
But  how  admirably  they  sum  up  all  the  wild  statesmanship 
of  these  later  days  in  lines  which  Mr.  Whibley,  account- 
ably enough,  fails  to  quote: 

They  tax  our  policy,  and  call  it  cowardice ; 
Count  wisdom  as  no  member  of  the  war ; 


146  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

Forestall  prescience,  and  esteem  no  act 
But  that  of  hand ;  the  still  and  mental  parts — 
That  do  contrive  how  many  hands  shall  strike, 
When  fitness  calls  them  on,  and  know,  by  measure 
Of  their  observant  toil,  the  enemies'  weight — 
Why,  this  hath  not  a  finger's  dignity. 
They  call  this  bed-work,  mappery,  closet-war : 
So  that  the  ram,  that  batters  down  the  wall, 
For  the  great  swing  and  rudeness  of  his  poise, 
They  place  before  his  hand  that  made  the  engine, 
Or  those  that  with  the  fineness  of  their  souls 
By  reason  guide  his  execution. 

There  is  not  much  in  the  moral  of  this  speech  to  bring 
balm  to  the  soul  of  the  author  of  the  Letters  of  an  Eng- 
lishman. 

Mr.  Whibley  is  not  content,  unfortunately,  with  having 
failed  to  grasp  the  point  of  Troilus  and  Cressida.  He 
blunders  with  equal  assiduity  in  regard  to  Coriolanus.  He 
treats  this  play,  not  as  a  play  about  Coriolanus,  but  as  a 
pamphlet  in  favour  of  Coriolanus.  He  has  not  been  initi- 
ated, it  seems,  into  the  first  secret  of  imaginative  litera- 
ture, which  is  that  one  may  portray  a  hero  sympathetically 
without  making  believe  that  his  vices  are  virtues.  Shake- 
speare no  more  endorses  Coriolanus's  patrician  pride  than 
he  endorses  Othello's  jealousy  or  Macbeth's  murderous 
ambition.  Shakespeare  was  concerned  with  painting  noble 
natures,  not  with  pandering  to  their  vices.  He  makes  us 
sympathize  with  Coriolanus  in  his  heroism,  in  his  suffer- 
ings, in  his  return  to  his  better  nature,  in  his  death;  but 
from  Shakespeare's  point  of  view,  as  from  most  men's  the 
Nietzschean  arrogance  which  led  Coriolanus  to  become  a 
traitor  to  his  city  is  a  theme  for  sadness,  not  (as  apparently 
with  Mr.  Whibley)  for  enthusiasm.  "  Shakespeare,"  cries 
Mr.  Whibley,  as  he  quotes  some  of  Coriolanus's  anti- 
popular  speeches,  "  will  not  let  the  people  off.  He  pursues 
it  with  an  irony  of  scorn."  '  There  in  a  few  lines,"  he 
writes  of  some  other  speeches,  "  are  expressed  the  external 
folly  and  shame  of  democracy.  Ever  committed  to  the 
worse  cause,  the  people  has  not  even  the  courage  of  its  own 


POLITICS  OF  SWIFT  AND  SHAKESPEARE    147 

opinions."  It  would  be  interesting  to  know  whether  in 
Mr.  Whibley's  eyes  Coriolamis's  hatred  of  the  people  is  a 
sufficiently  splendid  virtue  to  cover  his  guilt  in  becoming  a 
traitor.  That  good  Tories  have  the  right  to  become  traitors 
was  a  gospel  preached  often  enough  in  regard  to  the  Ulster 
trouble  before  the  war.  It  may  be  doubted,  however, 
whether  Shakespeare  was  sufficiently  a  Tory  to  foresee  the 
necessity  of  such  a  gospel  in  Coriolanus.  Certainly,  the 
mother  of  Coriolanns,  who  was  far  from  being  a  Radical, 
or  even  a  mild  Whig,  preached  the  very  opposite  of  the 
gospel  of  treason.  She  warned  Coriolanus  that  his  triumph 
over  Rome  would  be  a  traitor's  triumph,  that  his  name 
would  be  "  dogg'd  with  curses,"  and  that  his  character 
would  be  summed  up  in  history  in  one  fatal  sentence: 

The  man  was  noble, 

But  with  his  last  attempt  he  wiped  it  out, 
Destroyed  his  country,  and  his  name  remains 
To  the  ensuing  age  abhorr'd. 

Mr.  Whibley  appears  to  loathe  the  mass  of  human  beings 
so  excessively  that  he  does  not  quite  realize  the  enormity 
(from  the  modern  point  of  view)  of  Coriolanus's  crime. 
It  would,  I  agree,  be  foolish  to  judge  Coriolanus  too  scrupu- 
lously from  a  modern  point  of  view.  But  Mr.  Whibley 
has  asked  us  to  accept  the  play  as  a  tract  for  the  times,  and 
we  must  examine  it  as  such  in  order  to  discover  what  Mr. 
Whibley  means. 

But,  after  all,  Mr.  Whibley's  failure  as  a  portrait-painter 
is  a  failure  of  the  spirit  even  more  than  of  the  intellect.  A 
narrow  spirit  cannot  comprehend  a  magnanimous  spirit, 
and  Mr.  Whibley's  imagination  does  not  move  in  that  large 
Shakespearean  world  in  which  illustrious  men  salute  their 
mortal  enemies  in  immortal  sentences  of  praise  after  the 
manner  of 

He  was  the  noblest  Roman  of  them  all. 

The  author  who  is  capable  of  writing  Mr.  Whibley's  char- 
acter-study of  Fox  does  not  understand  enough  about  the 


148  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

splendour  and  the  miseries  of  human  nature  to  write  well 
on  Shakespeare.  Of  Fox  Mr.  Whibley  says : 

He  put  no  bounds  upon  his  hatred  of  England,  and  he  thought  it 
not  shameful  to  intrigue  with  foreigners  against  the  safety  and  credit 
of  the  land  to  which  he  belonged.  Wherever  there  was  a  foe  to 
England,  there  was  a  friend  of  Fox.  America,  Ireland,  France,  each 
in  turn  inspired  his  enthusiasm.  When  Howe  was  victorious  at 
Brooklyn,  he  publicly  deplored  "the  terrible  news."  After  Valmy  he 
did  not  hesitate  to  express  his  joy.  "  No  public  event,"  he  wrote, 
"  not  excepting  Yorktown  and  Saratoga,  ever  happened  that  gave  me 
so  much  delight.  I  could  not  allow  myself  to  believe  it  for  some 
days  for  fear  of  disappointment." 

It  does  not  seem  to  occur  to  Mr.  Whibley  that  in  regard  to 
A'merica,  Ireland,  and  France,  Fox  was,  according  to  the 
standard  of  every  ideal  for  which  the  Allies  professed  to 
fight,  tremendously  right,  and  that,  were  it  not  for  York- 
town  and  Valmy,  America  and  France  would  not  in  our 
own  time  have  been  great  free  nations  fighting  against  the 
embattled  Whibleys  of  Germany.  So  far  as  Mr.  Whib- 
ley's  political  philosophy  goes,  I  see  no  reason  why  he 
should  not  have  declared  himself  on  the  side  of  Germany. 
He  believes  in  patriotism,  it  is  true,  but  he  is  apparently  a 
patriot  of  the  sort  that  loves  his  country  and  hates  his 
fellow-countrymen  (if  that  is  what  he  means  by  "the 
people,"  and  presumably  it  must  be).  Mr.  Whibley  has 
certainly  the  mind  of  a  German  professor.  His  vehe- 
mence against  the  Germans  for  appreciating  Shakespeare  is 
strangely  like  a  German  professor's  vehemence  against  the 
English  for  not  appreciating  him.  "  Why  then,"  he  asks, 

should  the  Germans  have  attempted  to  lay  violent  hands  upon  our 
Shakespeare?  It  is  but  part  of  their  general  policy  of  pillage.  Steal- 
ing comes  as  easy  to  them  as  it  came  to  Bardolph  and  Nym,  who  in 
Calais  stole  a  fire-shovel.  Wherever  they  have  gone  they  have  cast  a 
thievish  eye  upon  what  does  not  belong  to  them.  They  hit  upon  the 
happy  plan  of  levying  tolls  upon  starved  Belgium.  It  was  not  enough 
for  their  greed  to  empty  a  country  of  food;  they  must  extract  some- 
thing from  its  pocket,  even  though  it  be  dying  of  hunger.  .  .  .  No 
doubt,  if  they  came  to  these  shores,  they  would  feed  their  fury  by 


POLITICS  OF  SWIFT  AND  SHAKESPEARE    149 

scattering  Shakespeare's  dust  to  the  winds  of  heaven.  As  they  are 
unable  to  sack  Stratford,  they  do  what  seems  to  them  the  next  best 
thing:  they  hoist  the  Jolly  Roger  over  Shakespeare's  works. 

Their  arrogance  is  busy  in  vain.  Shakespeare  shall  never  be  theirs. 
He  was  an  English  patriot,  who  would  always  have  refused  to  bow 
the  knee  to  an  insolent  alien. 

This  is  mere  foaming  at  the  mouth — the  tawdry  violence  of 
a  Tory  Thersites.  This  passage  is  a  measure  of  the  good 
sense  and  imagination  Mr.  Whibley  brings  to  the  study  of 
Shakespeare.  It  is  simply  theatrical  Jolly-Rogerism. 


XV.— THE  PERSONALITY  OF  MORRIS 

ONE  thinks  of  William  Morris  as  a  man  who  wished  to 
make  the  world  as  beautiful  as  an  illuminated  manuscript. 
He  loved  the  bright  colours,  the  gold,  the  little  strange 
insets  of  landscape,  the  exquisite  craftsmanship  of  decora- 
tion, in  which  the  genius  of  the  medieval  illuminators 
expressed  itself.  His  Utopia  meant  the  restoration,  not  so 
much  of  the  soul  of  man,  as  of  the  selected  delights  of  the 
arts  and  crafts  of  the  Middle  Ages.  His  passion  for  trap- 
pings— and  what  fine  trappings ! — is  admirably  suggested  by 
Mr.  Cunninghame  Graham  in  his  preface  to  Mr.  Compton- 
Rickett's  William  Morris :  a  Study  in  Personality.  Morris 
he  declares,  was  in  his  opinion  "  no  mystic,  but  a  sort  of 
symbolist  set  in  a  medieval  frame,  and  it  appeared  to  me 
that  all  his  love  of  the  old  times  of  which  he  wrote  was 
chiefly  of  the  setting;  of  tapestries  well  wrought;  of  needle- 
work, rich  colours  of  stained  glass  falling  upon  old  monu- 
ments, and  of  fine  work  not  scamped."  To  emphasize  the 
preoccupation  of  Morris  with  the  very  handiwork,  rather 
than  with  the  mystic  secrets,  of  beauty  is  not  necessarily  to 
diminish  his  name.  He  was  essentially  a  man  for  whom 
the  visible  world  existed,  and  in  the  manner  in  which  he 
wore  himself  out  in  his  efforts  to  reshape  the  visible  world 
he  proved  himself  one  of  the  great  men  of  his  century.  His 
life  was,  in  its  own  way,  devotional  ever  since  those  years 
in  which  Burne-Jones,  his  fellow-undergraduate  at  Oxford, 
wrote  to  him :  "  We  must  enlist  you  in  this  Crusade  and 
Holy  Warfare  against  the  age."  Like  all  revolutions,  of 
course,  the  Morris  revolution  was  a  prophecy  rather  than 
an  achievement.  But,  perhaps,  a  prophecy  of  Utopia  is 
itself  one  of  the  greatest  achievements  of  which  humanity 
is  capable. 

It  is  odd  that  one  who  spilled  out  his  genius  for  the 

150 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF  MORRIS  151 

world  of  men  should  have  been  so  self-sufficing,  so  little 
dependent  on  friendships  and  ordinary  human  relationships 
as  Morris  is  depicted  both  in  Mr.  Mackail's  biography  and 
Mr.  Compton-Rickett's  study.  Obviously,  he  was  a  man 
with  whom  generosity  was  a  second  nature.  When  he 
became  a  Socialist,  he  sold  the  greater  part  of  his  precious 
library  in  order  to  help  the  cause.  On  the  other  hand,  to 
balance  this,  we  have  Rossetti's  famous  assertion :  "  Top  "• 
the  general  nickname  for  Morris — "  never  gives  money  to 
a  beggar."  Mr.  Mackail,  if  I  remember  right,  accepted 
Rossetti's  statement  as  expressive  of  Morris's  indifference 
to  men  as  compared  with  causes.  Mr.  Compton-Rickett, 
however,  challenges  the  truth  of  the  observation.  "  The 
number  of  '  beggars,'  "  he  affirms,  "who  called  at  his  house 
and  went  away  rewarded  were  legion." 

Mr.  Belfort  Bax  declares  that  he  kept  a  drawerful  of  half-crowns 
for  foreign  anarchists,  because,  as  he  explained  apologetically :  "  They 
always  wanted  half-a-crown,  and  it  saved  time  to  have  a  stock 
ready." 

But  this  is  no  real  contradiction  of  Rossetti.  Morris's 
anarchists  represented  his  life's  work  to  him.  He  did  not 
help  them  from  that  personal  and  irrational  charity  which 
made  Rossetti  want  to  give  a  penny  to  a  beggar  in  the 
street.  This  may  be  regarded  as  a  supersubtle  distinction; 
but  it  is  necessary  if  we  are  to  understand  the  important 
fact  about  Morris  that — to  quote  Mr.  Compton-Rickett — 
"  human  nature  in  the  concrete  never  profoundly  interested 
him."  Enthusiastic  as  were  the  friendships  of  his  youth — 
when  he  gushed  into  "  dearests  "  in  his  letters — we  could 
imagine  him  as  living  without  friends  and  yet  being 
tolerably  happy.  He  was,  as  Mr.  Compton-Rickett  sug- 
gests, like  a  child  with  a  new  toy  in  his  discovery  of  ever- 
fresh  pursuits  in  the  three  worlds  of  Politics,  Literature 
and  Art.  He  was  a  person  to  whom  even  duties  were 
pleasures.  Mr.  Mackail  has  spoken  of  him  as  "  the  rare 
instance  of  a  man  who,  without  ever  once  swerving  from 
truth  or  duty,  knew  what  he  liked  and  did  what  he  liked, 
all  his  life  long."  One  thinks  of  him  in  his  work  as  a  child 


152  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

with  a  box  of  paints — an  inspired  child  with  wonderful 
paints  and  the  skill  to  use  them.  He  was  such  a  child  as 
accepts  companions  with  pleasure,  but  also  accepts  the 
absence  of  companions  with  pleasure.  He  could  absorb 
himself  in  his  games  of  genius  anywhere  and  everywhere. 
"  Much  of  his  literary  work  was  done  on  buses  and  in 
trains."  His  poetry  is  often,  as  it  were,  the  delightful 
nursery-work  of  a  grown  man.  "  His  best  work,"  as  Mr. 
Compton-Rickett  says,  "  reads  like  happy  improvisations." 
He  had  a  child's  sudden  and  impulsive  temper,  too.  Once, 
having  come  into  his  studio  in  a  rage,  he  "  took  a  flying 
kick  at  the  door,  and  smashed  in  a  panel."  "  It's  all  right," 
he  assured  the  scared  model,  who  was  preparing  to  fly; 
"  it's  all  right — something  had  to  give  way."  The  same 
violence  of  impulse  is  seen  in  the  story  of  how,  on  one 
occasion,  when  he  was  staying  in  the  country,  he  took  an 
artistic  dislike  to  his  hostess's  curtains,  and  tore  them  down 
during  the  night.  His  judgments  were  often  much  the 
same  kind  of  untempered  emotions  as  he  showed  in  the 
matter  of  the  curtains — his  complaint,  for  example,  that  a 
Greek  temple  was  "  like  a  table  on  four  legs :  a  damned  dull 
thing!  "  He  was  a  creature  of  whims:  so  much  so  that,  as 
a  boy,  he  used  to  have  the  curse,  "  Unstable  as  water,  thou 
shalt  not  excel,"  flung  at  him.  He  enjoyed  the  expression 
of  knock-out  opinions  such  as :  "I  always  bless  God  for 
making  anything  so  strong  as  an  onion !  "  He  laughed 
easily,  not  from  humour  so  much  as  from  a  romping  play- 
fulness. He  took  a  young  boy's  pleasure  in  showing  off 
the  strength  of  his  mane  of  dark  brown  hair.  He  would  get 
a  child  to  get  hold  of  it,  and  lift  him  off  the  ground  by  it 
"  with  no  apparent  inconvenience."  He  was  at  the  same 
time  nervous  and  restless.  He  was  given  to  talking  to 
himself;  his  hands  were  never  at  peace;  "  if  he  read  aloud, 
he  punched  his  own  head  in  the  exuberance  of  his  emo- 
tions." Possibly  there  was  something  high-strung  even 
about  his  play,  as  when,  Mr.  Mackail  tells  us,  "  he  would 
imitate  an  eagle  with  considerable  skill  and  humour,  climb- 
ing on  to  a  chair  and,  after  a  sullen  pause,  coming  down 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF  MORRIS  153 

with  a  soft,  heavy  flop."  It  seems  odd  that  Mr.  John  Burns 
could  say  of  this  sensitive  and  capricious  man  of  genius,  as 
we  find  him  saying  in  Mr.  Compton-Rickett's  book,  that 
"  William  Morris  was  a  chunk  of  humanity  in  the  rough ; 
he  was  a  piece  of  good,  strong,  unvarnished  oak — nothing 
of  the  elm  about  him."  But  we  can  forgive  Mr.  Burns's 
imperfect  judgment  in  gratitude  for  the  sentences  that 
follow : 

There  is  no  side  of  modern  life  which  he  has  not  touched  for  good. 
I  am  sure  he  would  have  endorsed  heartily  the  House  and  Town 
Planning  Act  for  which  I  am  responsible. 

Morris,  by  the  way,  would  have  appreciated  Mr.  Burns's 
reference  to  him  as  a  fellow-craftsman :  did  he  not  once 
himself  boast  of  being  "  a  master  artisan,  if  I  may  claim 
that  dignity  "  ? 

The  buoyant  life  of  this  craftsman-preacher — whose 
craftsmanship,  indeed,  was  the  chief  part  of  his  preaching — 
who  taught  the  labourers  of  his  age,  both  by  precept  and 
example,  that  the  difference  between  success  and  failure  in 
life  was  the  difference  between  being  artisans  of  loveliness 
and  poor  hack  workers  of  profitable  but  hideous  things — has 
a  unique  attractiveness  in  the  history  of  the  latter  half  of  the 
nineteenth  century.  He  is  a  figure  of  whom  we  cannot  be 
too  constantly  and  vividly  reminded.  When  I  took  up  Mr. 
Compton-Rickett's  book  I  was  full  of  hope  that  it  would 
reinterpret  for  a  new  generation  Morris's  evangelistic  per- 
sonality and  ideals.  Unfortunately,  it  contains  very  little 
of  importance  that  has  not  already  appeared  in  Mr.  Mac- 
kail's  distinguished  biography;  and  the  only  interpretation 
of  first-rate  interest  in  the  book  occurs  in  the  bold  imagina- 
tive prose  of  Mr.  Cunninghame  Graham's  introduction. 
More  than  once  the  author  tells  us  the  same  things  as  Mr. 
Mackail,  only  in  a  less  life-like  way.  For  example,  where 
Mr.  Mackail  says  of  Morris  that  "  by  the  time  he  was  seven 
years  old  he  had  read  all  the  Waverley  novels,  and  many 
of  Marryat's,"  Mr.  Compton-Rickett  vaguely  writes :  "  He 
was  suckled  on  Romance,  and  knew  his  Scott  and  Marryat 


154  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

almost  before  he  could  lisp  their  names."  That  is  typical 
of  Mr.  Compton-Rickett's  method.  Instead  of  contenting 
himself  with  simple  and  realistic  sentences  like  Mr.  Mac- 
kail's,  he  aims  at — and  certainly  achieves — a  kind  of  imita- 
tive picturesqueness.  We  again  see  his  taste  for  the  high- 
flown  in  such  a  paragraph  as  that  which  tells  us  that  "a 
common  bond  unites  all  these  men — Dickens,  Carlyle,  Rus- 
kin  and  Morris.  They  differed  in  much;  but,  like  great 
mountains  lying  apart  in  the  'base,  they  converge  high  up 
in  the  air."  The  landscape  suggested  in  these  sentences  is 
more  topsy-turvy  than  the  imagination  likes  to  dwell  upon. 
And  the  criticisms  in  the  book  are  seldom  lightning-flashes 
of  revelation.  For  instance : 

A  more  polished  artistry  we  find  in  Tennyson ;  a  greater  intellectual 
grip  in  Browning ;  a  more  haunting  magic  in  Rossetti ;  but  for  easy 
mastery  over  his  material  and  general  diffusion  of  beauty  Morris  has 
no  superior. 

That,  apart  from  the  excellent  "  general  diffusion  of 
beauty,"  is  the  kind  of  conventional  criticism  that  might 
pass  in  a  paper  read  to  a  literary  society.  But  somehow,  in 
a  critic  who  deliberately  writes  a  book,  we  look  for  a  greater 
and  more  personal  mastery  of  his  authors  than  Mr.  Comp- 
ton-Rickett  gives  evidence  of  in  the  too  facile  eloquence 
of  these  pages. 

The  most  interesting  part  of  the  book  is  that  which  is 
devoted  to  personalia.  But  even  in  the  matter  of  personalia 
Mr.  Cunninghame  Graham  tells  us  more  vital  things  in  a 
page  of  his  introduction  than  Mr.  Compton-Rickett  scatters 
through  a  chapter.  His  description  of  Morris's  appearance, 
if  not  a  piece  of  heroic  painting,  gives  us  a  fine  grotesque 
design  of  the  man : 

His  face  was  ruddy,  and  his  hair  inclined  to  red,  and  grew  in  waves 
like  water  just  before  it  breaks  over  a  fall.  His  beard  was  of  the 
same  colour  as  his  hair.  His  eyes  were  blue  and  fiery.  His  teeth, 
small  and  irregular,  but  white  except  upon  the  side  on  which  he  held 
his  pipe,  where  they  were  stained  with  brown.  When  he  walked  he 
swayed  a  little,  not  like  (sic)  a  sailor  sways,  but  as  a  man  who  lives 
a  sedentary  life  toddles  a  little  in  his  gait.  His  ears  were  small,  his 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF  MORRIS  155 

nose  high  and  well-made,  his  hands  and  feet  small  for  a  man  of  his 
considerable  bulk.  His  speech  and  address  were  fitting  the  man; 
bold,  bluff,  and  hearty.  .  .  .  He  was  quick-tempered  and  irritable, 
swift  to  anger  and  swift  to  reconciliation,  and  I  should  think  never 
bore  malice  in  his  life. 

When  he  talked  he  seldom  looked  at  you,  and  his  hands  were 
always  twisting,  as  if  they  wished  to  be  at  work. 

Such  was  the  front  the  man  bore.  The  ideal  for  which 
he  lived  may  be  summed  up,  in  Mr.  Compton-Rickett's 
expressive  phrase,  as  "the  democratization  of  beauty."  Or 
it  may  be  stated  more  humanly  in  the  words  which  Morris 
himself  spoke  at  the  grave  of  a  young  man  who  died  of 
injuries  received  at  the  hands  of  the  police  in  Trafalgar 
Square  on  "  Bloody  Sunday."  "  Our  friend,"  he  then  said : 

Our  friend  who  lies  here  has  had  a  hard  life,  and  met  with  a  hard 
death;  and,  if  society  had  been  differently  constituted,  his  life  might 
have  been  a  delightful,  a  beautiful,  and  a  happy  one.  It  is  our  busi- 
ness to  begin  to  organize  for  the  purpose  of  seeing  that  such  things 
shall  not  happen ;  to  try  and  make  this  earth  a  beautiful  and  happy 
place. 

There  you  have  the  sum  of  all  Morris's  teaching.  Like 
so  many  fine  artists  since  Plato,  he  dreamed  of  a  society 
which  would  be  as  beautiful  as  a  work  of  art.  He  saw  the 
future  of  society  as  a  radiant  picture,  full  of  the  bright 
light  of  hope,  as  he  saw  the  past  of  society  as  a  picture 
steeped  in  the  charming  lights  of  fancy.  He  once  explained 
Rossetti's  indifference  to  politics  by  saying  that  he  supposed 
"  it  needs  a  person  of  hopeful  mind  to  take  disinterested 
notice  of  politics,  and  Rossetti  was  certainly  not  hopeful." 
Morris  was  the  very  illuminator  of  hope.  He  was  as  hopeful 
a  man  as  ever  set  out  with  words  and  colours  to  bring  back 
the  innocent  splendours  of  the  Golden  Age. 


XVI.— GEORGE  MEREDITH 

(l)    THE   EGOIST 

GEORGE  MEREDITH,  as  his  friends  used  to  tell  one  with 
amusement,  was  a  vain  man.  Someone  has  related  how,  in 
his  later  years,  he  regarded  it  as  a  matter  of  extreme  import- 
ance that  his  visitors  should  sit  in  a  position  from  which 
they  would  see  his  face  in  profile.  This  is  symbolic  of  his 
attitude  to  the  world.  All  his  life  he  kept  one  side  of  his 
face  hidden.  Mr.  Ellis,  who  is  the  son  of  one  of  Meredith's 
cousins,  now  takes  us  for  a  walk  round  Meredith's  chair. 
No  longer  are  we  permitted  to  remain  in  restful  veneration 
of  "  a  god  and  a  Greek."  Mr.  Ellis  invites  us — and  we 
cannot  refuse  the  invitation — to  look  at  the  other  side  of  the 
face,  to  consider  the  full  face  and  the  back  of  the  head.  He 
encourages  us  to  feel  Meredith's  bumps,  and  no  man  whose 
bumps  we  are  allowed  to  feel  can  continue  for  five  minutes 
the  pretence  of  being  an  Olympian.  He  becomes  a  human 
being  under  a  criticizing  thumb.  We  discover  that  he  had 
a  genius  for  imposture,  an  egoist's  temper,  and  a  stomach 
that  fluttered  greedily  at  the  thought  of  dainty  dishes.  We 
find  all  those  characteristics  that  prevented  him  from  remain- 
ing on  good  terms  first  with  his  father,  next  with  his  wife, 
and  then  with  his  son.  At  first,  when  one  reads  the  full 
story  of  Meredith's  estrangements  through  three  genera- 
tions, one  has  the  feeling  that  one  is  in  the  presence  of  an 
idol  in  ruins.  Certainly,  one  can  never  mistake  Box  Hill 
for  Olympus  again.  On  the  other  hand,  let  us  but  have 
time  to  accustom  ourselves  to  see  Meredith  in  other  aspects 
than  that  which  he  himself  chose  to  present  to  his  contem- 
poraries— let  us  begin  to  see  in  him  not  so  much  one  of  the 
world's  great  comic  censors,  as  one  of  the  world's  great 
comic  subjects,  and  we  shall  soon  find  ourselves  back  among 

156 


GEORGE  MEREDITH  157 

his  books,  reading  them  no  longer  with  tedious  awe,  but 
with  a  new  passion  of  interest  in  the  figure-in-the-back- 
ground  of  the  complex  human  being  who  wrote  them. 

For  Meredith  was  his  own  great  subject.  Had  he  been 
an  Olympian  he  could  not  have  written  The  Egoist  or 
Harry  Richmond.  He  was  an  egoist  and  pretender,  com- 
ing of  a  line  of  egoists  and  pretenders,  and  his  novels  are 
simply  the  confession  and  apology  of  such  a  person.  Mere- 
dith concealed  the  truth  about  himself  in  his  daily  con- 
versation; he  revealed  it  in  his  novels.  He  made  such  a 
mystery  about  his  birth  that  many  people  thought  he  was  a 
cousin  of  Queen  Victoria's  or  at  least  a  son  of  Bulwer 
Lytton's.  It  was  only  in  Evan  Harrington  that  he  told 
the  essentials  of  the  truth  about  the  tailor's  shop  in  Ports- 
mouth above  which  he  was  born.  Outside  his  art,  nothing 
would  persuade  him  to  own  up  to  the  tailor's  shop.  Once, 
when  Mr.  Clodd  was  filling  in  a  census-paper  for  him, 
Meredith  told  him  to  put  "  near  Petersfield  "  as  his  place 
of  birth.  The  fact  that  he  was  born  at  Portsmouth  was 
not  publicly  known,  indeed,  until  some  time  after  his  death. 
And  not  only  was  there  the  tailor's  shop  to  live  down,  but 
on  his  mother's  side  he  was  the  grandson  of  a  publican, 
Michael  Macnamara.  Meredith  liked  to  boast  that  his 
mother  was  "pure  Irish" — an  exaggeration,  according  to 
Mr.  Ellis — but  he  said  nothing  about  Michael  Macnamara 
of  "  The  Vine."  At  the  same  time  it  was  the  presence 
not  of  a  bar  sinister  but  of  a  yardstick  sinister  in  his  coat 
of  arms  that  chiefly  filled  him  with  shame.  When  he  was 
marrying  his  first  wife  he  wrote  "  Esquire  "  in  the  register 
as  a  description  of  his  father's  profession.  There  is  no 
evidence,  apparently,  as  to  whether  Meredith  himself 
ever  served  in  the  tailor's  shop  after  his  father  moved  from 
Portsmouth  to  St.  James's  Street,  London.  Nothing  is 
known  of  his  life  during  the  two  years  after  his  return  from 
the  Moravian  school  at  Nemvied.  As  for  his  hapless 
father  (who  had  been  trained  as  a  medical  student  but  went 
into  the  family  business  in  order  to  save  it  from  ruin),  he 
did  not  succeed  in  London  any  better  than  in  Portsmouth, 


158  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

and  in  1849  ne  emigrated  to  South  Africa  and  opened  a 
shop  in  Cape  Town.  It  was  while  in  Cape  Town  that  he 
read  Meredith's  ironical  comedy  on  the  family  tailordom, 
Evan  Harrington;  or  He  Would  be  a  Gentleman.  Natur- 
ally, he  regarded  the  book  (in  which  his  father  and  himself 
were  two  of  the  chief  figures)  with  horror.  It  was  as 
though  George  had  washed  the  family  tape-measure  in 
public.  Augustus  Meredith,  no  less  than  George,  blushed 
for  the  tape-measure  daily.  Probably,  Melchizedek  Mere- 
dith, who  begat  Augustus,  who  begat  George,  had  also 
blushed  for  it  in  his  day.  As  the  "great  Mel"  in  Evan 
Harrington  he  is  an  immortal  figure  of  genteel  imposture. 
His  lordly  practice  of  never  sending  in  a  bill  was  hardly 
that  of  a  man  who  accepted  the  conditions  of  his  trade.  In 
Evan  Harrington  three  generations  of  a  family's  shame 
were  held  up  to  ridicule.  No  wonder  that  Augustus  Mere- 
dith, when  he  was  congratulated  by  a  customer  on  his  son's 
fame,  turned  away  silently  with  a  look  of  pain. 

The  comedy  of  the  Meredith  family  springs,  of  course, 
not  from  the  fact  that  they  were  tailors,  but  that  they 
pretended  not  to  be  tailors.  Whether  Meredith  himself 
was  more  ashamed  of  their  tailoring  or  their  pretentious- 
ness it  is  not  easy  to  decide.  Both  Evan  Harrington  and 
Harry  Richmond  are  in  a  measure,  comedies  of  impos- 
ture, in  which  the  vice  of  imposture  is  lashed  as  fiercely 
as  Moliere  lashes  the  vice  of  hypocrisy  in  Tartuffc.  But 
it  may  well  be  that  in  life  Meredith  was  a  snob,  while  in 
art  he  was  a  critic  of  snobs.  Mr.  Yeats,  in  his  last  book  of 
prose,  put  forward  the  suggestion  that  the  artist  reveals 
in  his  art  not  his  "self"  (which  is  expressed  in  his  life), 
but  his  "  anti-self,"  a  complementary  and  even  contrary 
self.  He  might  find  in  the  life  and  works  of  Meredith  some 
support  for  his  not  quite  convincing  theory.  Meredith 
was  an  egoist  in  his  life,  an  anti-egoist  in  his  books.  He 
was  pretentious  in  his  life,  anti-pretentious  in  his  books. 
He  took  up  the  attitude  of  the  wronged  man  in  his  life;  he 
took  up  the  case  of  the  wronged  woman  in  his  books.  In 
short,  his  life  was  vehemently  pro-George-Meredith,  while 


UEORUE  MEREDITH  159 

his  books  were  vehemently  anti-George-Meredith.  He  knew 
himself  more  thoroughly,  so  far  as  we  can  discover  from 
his  books,  than  any  other  English  novelist  has  ever  done. 
He  knew  himself  comically,  no  doubt,  rather  than 
tragically.  In  Modern  Love  and  Richard  Feverel  he 
reveals  himself  as  by  no  means  a  laughing  philosopher; 
but  he  strove  to  make  fiction  a  vehicle  of  philosophic 
laughter  rather  than  of  passionate  sympathy.  Were  it 
not  that  a  great  poetic  imagination  is  always  at  work — in 
his  prose,  perhaps,  even  more  than  in  his  verse — his  genius 
might  seem  a  little  cold  and  head-in-the-air.  But  his 
poet's  joy  in  his  characters  saves  his  books  from 
inhumanity.  As  Diana  Warwick  steps  out  in  the  dawn 
she  is  not  a  mere  female  human  being  undergoing  critical 
dissection;  she  is  bird-song  and  the  light  of  morning  and 
the  coming  of  the  flowers.  Meredith  had  as  great  a  capac- 
ity for  rapture  as  for  criticism  and  portraiture.  He  has 
expressed  in  literature  as  no  other  novelist  has  done  the 
rapturous  vision  of  a  boy  in  love.  He  knew  that  a  boy 
in  love  is  not  mainly  a  calf  but  a  poet.  Love  in  a  Valley 
is  the  incomparable  music  of  a  boy's  ecstasy.  Much  of 
Richard  Feverel  is  its  incomparable  prose.  Rapture  and 
criticism,  however,  make  a  more  practical  combination  in 
literature  than  in  life.  In  literature,  criticism  may  add 
flavour  to  rapture;  in  life  it  is  more  than  likely  to  destroy 
the  flavour.  One  is  not  surprised,  then,  to  learn  the  full 
story  of  Meredith's  first  unhappy  marriage.  A  boy  of 
twenty-one,  he  married  a  widow  of  thirty,  high-strung,  hot 
and  satirical  like  himself;  and  after  a  depressing  sequence 
of  dead  babies,  followed  by  the  birth  of  a  son  who  survived, 
she  found  life  with  a  man  of  genius  intolerable,  and  ran 
away  with  a  painter.  Meredith  apparently  refused  her 
request  to  go  and  see  her  when  she  was  dying.  His  imag- 
inative sympathy  enabled  him  to  see  the  woman's  point  of 
view  in  poetry  and  fiction ;  it  does  not  seem  to  have  extended 
to  his  life.  Thus,  his  biography  is  to  a  great  extent  a 
"  showing-up  "  of  George  Meredith.  He  proved  as  incap- 


160  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

able  of  keeping  the  affection  of  his  son  Arthur,  as  of  keep- 
ing that  of  his  wife.  Much  as  he  loved  the  boy  he  had 
not  been  married  again  long  before  he  allowed  him  to 
become  an  alien  presence.  The  boy  felt  he  had  a  grievance. 
He  said — probably  without  justice — that  his  father  kept 
him  short  of  money.  Possibly  he  was  jealous  for  his 
dead  mother's  sake.  Further,  though  put  into  business,  he 
had  literary  ambitions — a  prolific  source  of  bitterness.  When 
Arthur  died,  Meredith  did  not  even  attend  his  funeral. 

Mr.  Ellis  has  shown  Meredith  up  not  only  as  a  husband 
and  a  father,  but  as  a  hireling  journalist  and  a  lark-devour- 
ing gourmet.  On  the  whole,  the  poet  who  could  eat  larks 
in  a  pie  seems  to  me  to  be  a  more  shocking  "  great  man  " 
than  the  Radical  who  could  write  Tory  articles  in  a  news- 
paper for  pay.  At  the  same  time,  it  is  only  fair  to  say 
that  Meredith  remains  a  sufficiently  splendid  figure  in  Mr. 
Ellis's  book  even  when  we  know  the  worst  about  him. 
Was  his  a  generous  genius  ?  It  was  at  least  a  prodigal  one. 
As  poet,  novelist,  correspondent,  and  conversationalist,  he 
leaves  an  impression  of  beauty,  wit,  and  power  in  a  com- 
bination without  a  precedent. 


(2)    THE    OLYMPIAN    UNBENDS 

Lady  Butcher's  charming  Memoirs  of  George  Meredith 
is  admittedly  written  in  reply  to  Mr.  Ellis's  startling 
volume.  It  seems  to  me,  however,  that  it  is  a  supplement 
rather  than  a  reply.  Mr.  Ellis  was  not  quite  fair  to  Mere- 
dith as  a  man,  but  he  enabled  us  to  understand  the  limita- 
tions which  were  the  conditions  of  Meredith's  peculiar 
genius.  Many  readers  were  shocked  by  the  suggestion 
that  characters,  like  countries,  must  have  boundaries. 
Where  Mr.  Ellis  failed,  in  my  opinion,  was  not  in  drawing 
these  as  carefully  as  possible,  but  in  the  rather  unfriendly 
glee  with  which,  one  could  not  help  feeling,  he  did  so.  It 
is  also  true  that  he  missed  some  of  the  grander  mountain- 
peaks  in  Meredith's  character.  Lady  Butcher,  on  the 


GEORGE  MEREDITH  161 

other  hand,  is  far  less  successful  than  Mr.  Ellis  in  drawing 
a  portrait  which  makes  us  feel  that  now  we  understand 
something  of  the  events  that  gave  birth  to  The  Egoist  and 
Richard  Feverel  and  Modern  Love.  Her  book  tells  us 
nothing  of  the  seed-time  of  genius,  but  is  a  delightful 
account  of  its  autumn. 

At  the  same  time  it  helps  to  dissipate  one  ridiculous 
popular  fallacy  about  Meredith.  Meredith,  like  most  all 
the  wits,  has  been  accused  of  straining  after  image  and 
epigram.  Wit  acts  as  an  irritant  on  many  people.  They 
forget  the  admirable  saying  of  Coleridge:  "Exclusive  of 
the  abstract  sciences,  the  largest  and  worthiest  portion  of 
our  knowledge  consists  of  aphorisms;  and  the  greatest  of 
men  is  but  an  aphorism."  They  might  as  well  denounce 
a  hedge  for  producing  wild  roses  or  a  peacock  for  growing 
tail  feathers  with  pretty  eyes  as  a  witty  writer  for  flower- 
ing into  aphorism,  epigram  and  image.  Even  so  artificial 
a  writer  as  Wilde  had  not  to  labour  to  be  witty.  It  has 
often  been  laid  to  his  charge  that  his  work  smells  of  the 
lamp,  whereas  what  is  really  the  matter  with  it  is  that  it 
smells  of  the  drawing-room  gas.  It  was  the  result  of  too 
much  "  easy-goingness,"  not  of  too  much  strain.  As  for 
Meredith,  his  wit  was  the  wit  of  an  abounding  imagina- 
tion. Lady  Butcher  gives  some  delightful  examples  of  it. 
He  could  not  see  a  baby  in  long  robes  without  a  witty 
image  leaping  into  his  mind.  He  said  he  adored  babies 
"  in  the  comet  stage." 

Of  a  lady  of  his  acquaintance  he  said :  "  She  is  a  woman 
who  has  never  had  the  first  tadpole  wriggle  of  an  idea," 
adding,  "  She  has  a  mind  as  clean  and  white  and  flat  as  a 
plate:  there  are  no  eminences  in  it."  Lady  Butcher  tells 
of  a  picnic-party  on  Box  Hill  at  which  Meredith  was  one 
of  the  company.  "  After  our  picnic  ...  it  came  on  to 
rain,  and  as  we  drearily  trudged  down  the  hill  with  cloaks 
and  umbrellas,  and  burdened  with  our  tea  baskets,  Mr. 
Meredith,  with  a  grimace,  called  out  to  a  passing  friend: 
1  Behold !  the  funeral  of  picnic ! ' ' 

If  Meredith  is  to  some  extent  an  obscure  author,  it  is 


162  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

clear  that  this  was  not  due  to  his  over-reaching  himself  in 
laborious  efforts  after  wit.  His  obscurity  is  not  that  of  a 
man  straining  after  expression,  but  the  obscurity  of  a  man 
deliberately  hiding  something.  Meredith  believed  in 
being  as  mysterious  as  an  oracle.  He  assumed  the 
Olympian  manner,  and  objected  to  being  mistaken  for  a 
frequenter  of  the  market-place.  He  was  impatient  of 
ordinary  human  witlessness,  and  spoke  to  his  fellows,  not 
as  man  to  man,  but  as  Apollo  from  his  seat.  This  was 
probably  a  result  of  the  fact  that  his  mind  marched  much 
too  fast  for  the  ordinary  man  to  keep  pace  with  it.  "  How 
I  leaped  through  leagues  of  thought  when  I  could  walk!" 
he  once  said  when  he  had  lost  the  power  of  his  legs.  Such 
buoyancy  of  the  imagination  and  intellect  separated  him 
more  and  more  from  a  world  in  which  most  of  the  athletics 
are  muscular,  not  mental;  and  he  began  to  take  a  malicious 
pleasure  in  exaggerating  the  difference  that  already  existed 
between  himself  and  ordinary  mortals.  He  dressed  his 
genius  in  a  mannerism,  and,  as  he  leaped  through  his  leagues 
of  thought,  the  flying  skirts  of  his  mannerism  were  all  that 
the  average  reader  panting  desperately  after  him  could  see. 
Shakespeare  and  the  greatest  men  of  genius  are  human 
enough  to  wait  for  us,  and  give  us  time  to  recover  our 
breath.  Meredith,  however,  was  a  proud  man,  and  a  mocker. 
In  the  ordinary  affairs  of  life,  Lady  Butcher  tells  us,  he 
was  so  proud  that  it  was  difficult  to  give  him  even  trifling 
gifts.  "  I  remember,"  she  says,  "  bringing  him  two  silver 
flat  poached-egg  spoons  from  Norway,  and  he  implored 
me  to  take  them  back  with  me  to  London,  and  looked  much 
relieved  when  I  consented  to  do  so ! "  He  would  always 
"  prefer  to  bestow  rather  than  to  accept  gifts."  Lady 
Butcher,  replying  to  the  charge  that  he  was  ungrateful, 
suggests  that  "  no  one  should  expect  an  eagle  to  be  grate- 
ful." But  then,  neither  can  one  love  an  eagle,  and  one 
would  like  to  be  able  to  love  the  author  of  Love  in  a  Valley 
and  Richard  Fcverel.  Meredith  was  too  keenly  aware 
what  an  eagle  he  was.  Speaking  of  the  reviewers  who  had 


GEORGE  MEREDITH  163 

attacked  him,  he  said :  "  They  have  always  been  abusing 
me.  I  have  been  observing  them.  It  is  the  crueller  pro- 
cess." It  is  quite  true,  but  it  was  a  superior  person  who 
said  it. 

Meredith,  however,  among  his  friends  and  among  the 
young,  loses  this  air  of  superiority,  and  becomes  some- 
thing of  a  radiant  romp  as  well  as  an  Olympian.  Lady 
Butcher's  first  meeting  with  him  took  place  when  she  was 
a  girl  of  thirteen.  She  was  going  up  Box  Hill  to  see  the 
sun  rise  with  a  sixteen-year-old  cousin,  when  the  latter 
said :  "  I  know  a  madman  who  lives  on  Box  Hill.  He's 
quite  mad,  but  very  amusing;  he  likes  walks  and  sunrises. 
Let's  go  and  shout  him  up !  "  It  does  Meredith  credit  that 
he  got  out  of  bed  and  joined  them,  "  his  nightshirt  thrust 
into  brown  trousers."  Even  when  the  small  girl  insisted 
on  "  reading  aloud  to  him  one  of  the  hymns  from  Keble's 
Christian  Year,  he  did  not,  as  the  saying  is,  turn  a  hair. 
His  attachment  to  his  daughter  Mariette — his  "  dearie 
girl,"  as  he  spoke  of  her  with  unaffected  softness  of 
phrase — also  helps  one  to  realize  that  he  was  not  all 
Olympian.  Meredith,  the  condemner  of  the  "  guarded 
life,"  was  humanly  nervous  in  guarding  his  own  little 
daughter.  "  He  would  never  allow  Mariette  to  travel 
alone,  even  the  very  short  distance  by  train  from  Box  Hill 
to  Ewell;  a  maid  had  always  to  be  sent  with  her  or  to 
fetch  her.  He  never  allowed  her  to  walk  by  herself."  One 
likes  Meredith  the  better  for  Lady  Butcher's  picture  of 
him  as  a  "  harassed  father." 

One  likes  him,  too,  as  he  converses  with  his  dogs,  and 
for  his  thoughtfulness  in  giving  some  of  his  MSS.,  includ- 
ing that  of  Richard  Fever  el,  to  Frank  Cole,  his  gardener, 
in  the  hope  that  "  some  day  the  gardener  would  be  able 
to  sell  them  "  and  so  get  some  reward  for  his  devotion. 
As  to  the  underground  passages  in  Meredith's  life  and 
character,  Lady  Butcher  is  not  concerned  with  them.  She 
writes  of  him  merely  as  she  knew  him.  Her  book  is  a 
friend's  tribute,  though  not  a  blind  tribute.  It  may  not 
be  effective  as  an  argument  against  those  who  are  bent  on 


164  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

disparaging  the  greatest  lyrical  wit  in  modern  English 
literature.  But  it  will  be  welcomed  by  those  for  whom 
Meredith's  genius  is  still  a  bubbling  spring  of  good  sense 
and  delight. 

(3)    THE    ANGLO-IRISH    ASPECT 

Meredith  never  wrote  a  novel  which  was  less  a  novel  than 
Celt  and  Saxon.  It  is  only  a  fragment  of  a  book.  It  is  so 
much  a  series  of  essays  and  sharp  character-sketches,  how- 
ever, that  the  untimely  fall  of  the  curtain  does  not  greatly 
trouble  us.  There  is  no  excitement  of  plot,  no  gripping 
anxiety  as  to  whether  this  or  that  pair  of  lovers  will  ever 
reach  the  altar.  Philip  O'Donnell  and  Patrick,  his 
devoted  brother,  and  their  caricature  relative,  the  middle- 
aged  Captain  Con,  all  interest  us  as  they  abet  each  other 
in  the  affairs  of  love  or  politics,  or  as  they  discuss  their 
native  country  or  the  temperament  of  the  country  which 
oppresses  it;  but  they  are  chiefly  desirable  as  performers  in 
an  Anglo-Irish  fantasia,  a  Meredithian  piece  of  comic 
music,  with  various  national  anthems,  English,  Welsh, 
and  Irish,  running  through  and  across  it  in  all  manner  of 
guises,  and  producing  all  manner  of  agreeable  dishar- 
monies. 

In  the  beginning  we  have  Patrick  O'Donnell,  an 
enthusiast,  a  Celt,  a  Catholic,  setting  out  for  the  English 
mansion  of  the  father  of  Adiante  Adister  to  find  if  the  girl 
cannot  be  pleaded  over  to  reconsider  her  refusal  of  his 
brother  Philip.  He  arrives  in  the  midst  of  turmoil  in  the 
house,  the  cause  of  it  being  a  hasty  marriage  which  Adiante 
had  ambitiously  contracted  with  a  hook-nosed  foreign 
prince.  Patrick,  a  broken-hearted  proxy,  successfully 
begs  her  family  for  a  miniature  of  the  girl  to  take  back  to 
his  brother,  but  he  falls  so  deeply  in  love  with  her  on 
seeing  the  portrait  that  his  loyalty  to  Philip  almost  wavers, 
when  the  latter  carelessly  asks  him  to  leave  the  miniature 
on  a  more  or  less  public  table  instead  of  taking  it  off  to  the 
solitude  of  his  own  room  for  a  long  vigil  of  adoration. 

In  the  rest  of  the  story  we  have  an  account  of  the  brothers 


GEORGE  MEREDITH  165 

in  the  London  house  of  Captain  Con,  the  happy  husband 
married  to  a  stark  English  wife  of  mechanical  propriety — a 
rebellious  husband,  too,  when  in  the  sociable  atmosphere 
of  his  own  upper  room,  amid  the  blackened  clay  pipes  and 
the  friendly  fumes  of  whiskey,  he  sings  her  praises,  while 
at  the  same  time  full  of  grotesque  and  whimsical  criticisms 
of  all  those  things,  Saxon  and  more  widely  human,  for 
which  she  stands.  There  is  a  touch  of  farce  in  the  rela- 
tions of  these  two,  aptly  symbolized  by  the  bell  which 
rings  for  Captain  Con,  and  hastens  him  away  from  his 
midnight  eloquence  with  Patrick  and  Philip.  "  He  groaned, 
'  I  must  go.  I  haven't  heard  the  tinkler  for  months.  It 
signifies  she's  cold  in  her  bed.  The  thing  called  circulation 
is  unknown  to  her  save  by  the  aid  of  outward  application, 
and  I'm  the  warming-pan,  as  legitimately  as  I  should  be, 
I'm  her  husband  and  her  Harvey  in  one.' ' 

It  is  in  the  house  of  Captain  Con,  it  should  be  added, 
that  Philip  and  Patrick  meet  Jane  Mattock,  the  Saxon 
woman;  and  the  story  as  we  have  it  ends  with  Philip 
invalided  home  from  service  in  India,  and  Jane,  a  victim 
of  love,  catching  "  glimpses  of  the  gulfs  of  bondage, 
delicious,  rose-enfolded,  foreign."  There  are  nearly  three 
hundred  pages  of  it  altogether,  some  of  them  as  fantastic 
and  lyrical  as  any  that  Meredith  ever  wrote. 

As  one  reads  Celt  and  Saxon,  however,  one  seems  to 
get  an  inkling  of  the  reason  why  Meredith  has  so  often 
been  set  down  as  an  obscure  author.  It  is  not  entirely  that 
he  is  given  to  using  imagery  as  the  language  of  explana- 
tion— a  subtle  and  personal  sort  of  hieroglyphics.  It  is 
chiefly,  I  think,  because  there  is  so  little  direct  painting  of 
men  and  women  in  his  books.  Despite  his  lyricism,  he 
had  something  of  an  X-ray's  imagination.  The  details  of 
the  modelling  of  a  face,  the  interpreting  lines  and  looks, 
did  not  fix  themselves  with  preciseness  on  his  vision  ena- 
bling him  to  pass  them  on  to  us  with  the  surface  reality  we 
generally  demand  in  prose  fiction. 

It  is  as  though  he  painted  some  of  his  men  and  women 


166  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

upon  air :  they  are  elusive  for  all  we  know  of  their  mental 
and  spiritual  processes.  Even  though  he  is  at  pains  to 
tell  us  that  Diana's  hair  is  dark,  we  do  not  at  once  accept 
the  fact  but  are  at  liberty  to  go  on  believing  she  is  a  fair 
woman,  for  he  himself  was  general  rather  than  insistently 
particular  in  his  vision  of  such  matters.  In  the  present 
book,  again,  we  have  a  glimpse  of  Adiante  in  her  minia- 
ture— "  this  lighted  face,  with  the  dark  raised  eyes  and 
abounding  auburn  tresses,  where  the  contrast  of  colours 
was  in  itself  thrilling,"  "  the  light  above  beauty  distinguish- 
ing its  noble  classic  lines  and  the  energy  of  radiance,  like 
a  morning  of  chivalrous  promise,  in  the  eyes" — and,  de- 
spite the  details  mentioned,  the  result  is  to  give  us  only  the 
lyric  aura  of  the  woman  where  we  wanted  a  design. 

Ultimately,  these  women  of  Meredith's  become  intensely 
real  to  us — the  most  real  women,  I  think,  in  English  fic- 
tion— but,  before  we  come  to  handshaking  terms  with 
them,  we  have  sometimes  to  go  to  them  over  bogs  and 
rocky  places  with  the  sun  in  our  eyes.  Before  this,  physi- 
cally, they  are  apt  to  be  exquisite  parts  of  a  landscape, 
sharers  of  a  lyric  beauty  with  the  cherry-trees  and  the 
purple  crocuses. 

Coming  to  the  substance  of  the  book— the  glance  from 
many  sides  at  the  Irish  and  English  temperaments — we 
find  Meredith  extremely  penetrating  in  his  criticism  of 
John  Bullishness,  but  something  of  a  foreigner  in  his  study 
of  the  Irish  character.  The  son-  of  an  Irishwoman,  he 
chose  an  Irishwoman  as  his  most  conquering  heroine,  but 
he  writes  of  the  race  as  one  who  has  known  the  men  and 
women  of  it  entirely,  or  almost  entirely,  in  an  English 
setting — a  setting,  m  other  words,  which  shows  up  their 
strangeness  and  any  surface  eccentricities  they  may  have, 
but  does  not  give  us  an  ordinary  human  sense  of  them. 
Captain  Con  is  vital,  because  Meredith  imagined  him  vitally, 
but  when  all  is  said  and  done,  he  is  largely  a  stage-Irishman, 
winking  over  his  whiskey  that  has  paid  no  excise — a  better- 
born  relative  of  Captain  Costigan. 


GEORGE  MEREDITH  167 

Politically,  Celt  and  Saxon  seems  to  be  a  plea  for  Home 
Rule — Home  Rule,  with  a  view  towards  a  "  consolidation 
of  the  union."  Its  diagnosis  of  the  Irish  difficulty  is  one 
which  has  long  been  popular  with  many  intellectual  men 
on  this  side  of  the  Irish  Sea.  Meredith  sees,  as  the  roots 
of  the  trouble,  misunderstanding,  want  of  imagination, 
want  of  sympathy.  It  has  always  seemed  curious  to  me 
that  intelligent  men  could  persuade  themselves  that  Ire- 
land was  chiefly  suffering  from  want  of  understanding  and 
want  of  sympathy  on  the  part  of  England,  when  all  the 
time  her  only  ailment  has  been  want  of  liberty.  To  adapt 
the  organ-grinder's  motto, 

Sympathy  without  relief 

Is  like  mustard  without  beef. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  Meredith  realized  this,  and  was  «.  friend 
to  many  Irish  national  movements  from  the  Home  Rule 
struggle  down  to  the  Gaelic  League,  to  the  latter  of  which 
the  Irish  part  of  him  sent  a  subscription  a  year  or  two  ago. 
He  saw  things  from  the  point  of  view  of  an  Imperial 
Liberal  idealist,  however,  not  of  a  Nationalist.  In  the 
result,  he  did  not  know  the  every-day  and  traditional 
setting  of  Irish  life  sufficiently  well  to  give  us  an  Irish 
Nationalist  central  figure  as  winning  and  heroic,  even  in 
his  extravagances,  as,  say,  the  patriotic  Englishman,  Neville 
Beauchamp. 

At  the  same  time,  one  must  be  thankful  for  a  book  so 
obviously  the  work  of  a  great  abundant  mind — a  mind 
giving  out  its  criticisms  like  flutters  of  birds — a  heroic  intel- 
lect always  in  the  service  of  an  ideal  liberty,  courage,  and 
gracious  manners — a  characteristically  island  brain,  that  was 
yet  not  insular. 


XVII.— OSCAR  WILDE 

OSCAR  WILDE  is  a  writer  whom  one  must  see  through  in 
order  to  appreciate.  One  must  smash  the  idol  in  order  to 
preserve  the  god.  If  Mr.  Ransome's  estimate  of  Wilde  in 
his  clever  and  interesting  and  seriously-written  book  is  a 
little  unsatisfactory,  it  is  partly  because  he  is  not  enough 
of  an  iconoclast.  He  has  not  realized  with  sufficient  clear- 
ness that,  while  Wilde  belonged  to  the  first  rank  as  a  wit, 
he  was  scarcely  better  than  second-rate  as  anything  else. 
Consequently,  it  is  not  Wilde  the  beau  of  literature  who 
dominates  his  book.  Rather,  it  is  Wilde  the  egoistic, 
— aesthetic  philosopher,  and  Wilde  the  imaginative  artist. 

This  is,  of  course,  as  Wilde  would  have  liked  it  to  be. 
For,  as  Mr.  Ransome  says,  "  though  Wilde  had  the  secret 
of  a  wonderful  laughter,  he  preferred  to  think  of  himself  as 
a  person  with  magnificent  dreams."  Indeed,  so  much  was 
this  so,  that  it  is  even  suggested  that,  if  Salome  had  not 
been  censored,  the  social  comedies  might  never  have  been 
written.  "  It  is  possible,"  observes  Mr.  Ransome,  "  that 
we  owe  The  Importance  of  Being  Earnest  to  the  fact  that 
the  Censor  prevented  Sarah  Bernhardt  from  playing  Salome 
at  the  Palace  Theatre."  If  this  conjecture  is  right,  one 
can  never  think  quite  so  unkindly  of  the  Censor  again,  for 
in  The  Importance  of  Being  Earnest,  and  in  it  alone,  Wilde 
achieved  a  work  of  supreme  genius  in  its  kind. 

It  is  as  lightly-built  as  a  house  of  cards,  a  frail  edifice  of 
laughter  for  laughter's  sake.  Or  you  might  say  that,  in  the 
literature  of  farce,  it  has  a  place  as  a  "  dainty  rogue  in 
porcelain."  It  is  even  lighter  and  more  fragile  than  that. 
It  is  a  bubble,  or  a  flight  of  bubbles.  It  is  the  very  ecstasy 
of  levity.  As  we  listen  to  Lady  Bracknell  discussing  the 
possibility  of  parting  with  her  daughter  to  a  man  who  had 
been  "  born,  or  at  least  bred,  in  a  handbag,"  or  as  we  watch 
Jack  and  Algernon  wrangling  over  the  propriety  of  eating 

168 


OSCAR  WILDE  169 


muffins  in  an  hour  of  gloom,  we  seem  somehow  to  be  caught 
up  and  to  sail  through  an  exhilarating  mid-air  of  nonsense. 
Some  people  will  contend  that  Wilde's  laughter  is  always 
the  laughter  not  of  the  open  air  but  of  the  salon.  But  there 
is  a  spontaneity  in  the  laughter  of  The  Importance  of  Being 
Earnest  that  seems  to  me  to  associate  it  with  running  water 
and  the  sap  rising  in  the  green  field. 

It  is  when  he  begins  to  take  Wilde  seriously  as  a  serious 
writer  that  one  quarrels  with  Mr.  Ransome.  Wilde  was 
much  better  at  showing  off  than  at  revealing  himself,  and, 
as  the  comedy  of  showing  off  is  much  more  delightful  than 
the  solemn  vanity  of  it,  he  was  naturally  happiest  as  a  wit 
and  persifleur.  On  his  serious  side  he  ranks,  not  as  an 
original  artist,  but  as  a  popularizer — the  most  accomplished 
popularizer,  perhaps,  in  English  literature.  He  popularized 
William  Morris,  both  his  domestic  interiors  and  his 
Utopias,  in  the  aesthetic  lectures  and  in  The  Soul  of  Man 
under  Socialism — a  wonderful  pamphlet,  the  secret  of  the 
world-wide  fame  of  which  Mr.  Ransome  curiously  misses. 
He  popularized  the  cloistral  aestheticism  of  Pater  and  the 
cultural  egoism  of  Goethe  in  Intentions  and  elsewhere.  In 
Salome  he  popularized  the  gorgeous  processionals  of  orna- 
mental sentences  upon  which  Flaubert  had  expended  not 
the  least  marvellous  portion  of  his  genius. 

Into  an  age  that  guarded  respectability  more  closely  than 
virtue  and  ridiculed  beauty  because  it  paid  no  dividend 
came  Wilde,  the  assailant  of  even  the  most  respectable 
ugliness,  parrying  the  mockery  of  the  meat  tea  with  a 
mockery  that  sparkled  like  wine.  Lighting  upon  a  world 
that  advertised  commercial  wares,  he  set  himself  to  advertise 
art  with  as  heroic  an  extravagance,  and  who  knows  how 
much  his  puce  velvet  knee-breeches  may  have  done  to  make 
the  British  public  aware  of  the  genius,  say,  of  Walter 
Pater?  Not  that  Wilde  was  not  a  finished  egoist,  using 
the  arts  and  the  authors  to  advertise  himself  rather  than 
himself  to  advertise  them.  But  the  time-spirit  contrived 
that  the  arts  and  the  authors  should  benefit  by  his  outrageous 
breeches. 


170  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

It  is  in  the  relation  of  a  great  popularizer,  then — a  popu- 
larizer  who,  for  a  new  thing,  was  not  also  a  vulgarizer — 
that  Wilde  seems  to  me  to  stand  to  his  age.  What,  then, 
of  Mr.  Ransome's  estimate  of  Salome?  That  it  is  a  fasci- 
nating play  no  lover  of  the  pageantry  of  words  can  deny. 
But  of  what  quality  is  this  fascination?  It  is,  when  all 
is  said  and  done,  the  fascination  of  the  lust  of  painted 
faces.  Here  we  have  no  tragedy,  but  a  mixing  of  degenerate 
philtres.  Mr.  Ransome  hears  "  the  beating  of  the  wings  of 
the  angel  of  death  "  in  the  play ;  but  that  seems  to  me  to  be 
exactly  the  atmosphere  that  Wilde  fails  to  create.  As  the 
curtain  falls  on  the  broken  body  of  Salome  one  has  a  sick 
feeling,  as  though  one  had  been  present  where  vermin  were 
being  crushed.  There  is  not  a  hint  of  the  elation,  the 
liberation,  of  real  tragedy.  The  whole  thing  is  simply  a 
wonderful  piece  of  coloured  sensationalism.  And  even  if 
we  turn  to  the  costly  sentences  of  the  play,  do  we  not  find 
that,  while  in  his  choice  of  colour  and  jewel  and  design 
Flaubert  wrought  in  language  like  a  skilled  artificer,  Wilde, 
in  his  treatment  of  words,  was  more  like  a  lavish  amateur 
about  town  displaying  his  collection  of  splendid  gems? 

Wilde  speaks  of  himself  in  De  Profundis  as  a  lord  of 
language.  Of  course,  he  was  just  the  opposite.  Language 
was  a  vice  with  him.  He  took  to  it  as  a  man  might  take  to 
drink.  He  was  addicted  rather  than  devoted  to  language. 
He  had  a  passion  for  it,  but  too  little  sense  of  responsibility 
towards  it,  and,  in  his  choice  of  beautiful  words,  we  are 
always  conscious  of  the  indolence  as  well  as  the  extrava- 
gance of  the  man  of  pleasure.  How  beautifully,  with  what 
facility  of  beauty,  he  could  use  words,  everyone  knows  who 
has  read  his  brief  Endymion  (to  name  one  of  the  poems), 
and  the  many  hyacinthine  passages  in  Intentions.  But 
when  one  is  anxious  to  see  the  man  himself  as  in  De  Pro- 
fundis— that  book  of  a  soul  imprisoned  in  embroidered 
sophistries — one  feels  that  this  cloak  of  strange  words  is 
no  better  than  a  curse. 

If  Wilde  was  not  a  lord  of  language,  however,  but  only 
its  bejewelled  slave,  he  was  a  lord  of  laughter,  and  it  is 


OSCAR  WILDE  171 


because  there  is  so  much  laughter  as  well  as  language  in 
Intentions  that  I  am  inclined  to  agree  with  Mr.  Ransome 
that  Intentions  is  "  that  one  of  Wilde's  books  that  most 
nearly  represents  him."  Even  here,  however,  Mr.  Ran- 
some will  insist  on  taking  Wilde  far  too  seriously.  For 
instance,  he  tells  us  that  "  his  paradoxes  are  only  unfamiliar 
truths."  How  horrified  Wilde  would  have  been  to  hear 
him  say  so!  His  paradoxes  are  a  good  deal  more  than 
truths — or  a  good  deal  less.  They  helped,  no  doubt,  to 
redress  a  balance,  but  many  of  them  were  the  merest  exer- 
cises in  intellectual  rebellion.  Mr.  Ransome's  attitude  on 
the  question  of  Wilde's  sincerity  seems  to  me  as  impossible 
as  his  attitude  in  regard  to  the  paradoxes.  He  draws  up  a 
code  of  artistic  sincerity  which  might  serve  as  a  gospel  for 
minor  artists,  but  of  which  every  great  artist  is  a  living 
denial.  But  there  is  no  room  to  go  into  that.  Disagree  as 
we  may  with  many  of  Mr.  Ransome's  conclusions,  we  must 
be  grateful  to  him  for  a  thoughtful,  provocative,  and  am- 
bitious study  of  one  of  the  most  brilliant  personalities  and 
wits,  though  by  no  means  one  of  the  most  brilliant  imagina- 
tive artists,  of  the  nineteenth  century. 


XVIII.— TWO  ENGLISH  CRITICS 

(l)    MR.    SAINTSBURY 

MR.  SAINTSBURY  as  a  critic  possesses  in  a  high  degree  the 
gift  of  sending  the  reader  post-haste  to  the  works  he  criti- 
cizes. His  Peace  of  the  Augustans  is  an  almost  irresistible 
incitement  to  go  and  forget  the  present  world  among  the 
poets  and  novelists  and  biographers  and  letter-writers  of 
the  eighteenth  century.  His  enthusiasm  weaves  spells 
about  even  the  least  of  them.  He  does  not  merely  remind 
us  of  the  genius  of  Pope  and  Swift,  of  Fielding  and  John- 
son and  Walpole.  He  also  summons  us  to  Armory's  John 
Buncle  and  to  the  Reverend  Richard  Graves's  Spiritual 
Quixote  as  to  a  feast.  Of  the  latter  novel  he  declares  that 
"  for  a  book  that  is  to  be  amusing  without  being  flimsy,  and 
substantial  without  being  ponderous,  The  Spiritual  Quixote 
may,  perhaps,  be  commended  above  all  its  predecessors  and 
contemporaries  outside  the  work  of  the  great  Four  them- 
selves." That  is  characteristic  of  the  wealth  of  invitations 
scattered  through  The  Peace  of  the  Augustans.  After 
reading  the  book,  one  can  scarcely  resist  the  temptation  to 
spend  an  evening  over  Young's  Night  Thoughts,  and  one 
will  be  almost  more  likely  to  turn  to  Prior  than  to  Shake- 
speare himself — Prior  who,  "  with  the  eternal  and  almost 
unnecessary  exception  of  Shakespeare  ...  is  about  the 
first  to  bring  out  the  true  English  humour  which  involves 
sentiment  and  romance,  which  laughs  gently  at  its  own  tears, 
and  has  more  than  half  a  tear  for  its  own  laughter  " — Prior, 
of  whom  it  is  further  written  that  "no  one,  except 
Thackeray,  has  ever  entered  more  thoroughly  into  the  spirit 
of  Ecclesiastes."  It  does  not  matter  that  in  a  later  chapter 
of  the  book  it  is  Rasselas  which  is  put  with  Ecclesiastes, 
and,  after  Rasselas,  The  Vanity  of  Human  Wishes.  One 

172 


TWO  ENGLISH  CRITICS  173 

does  not  go  to  Mr.  Saintsbury  as  an  inspector  of  literary 
weights  and  measures.  His  estimates  of  authors  are  the 
impressions  of  a  man  talking  in  a  hurry,  and  his  method 
is  the  method  of  exaggeration  rather  than  of  precise  state- 
ment. How  deficient  he  is  in  the  sense  of  proportion  may 
be  judged  from  the  fact  that  he  devotes  slightly  more  space 
to  Collins  than  to  Pope,  unless  the  pages  in  which  he  assails 
"  Grub  Street "  as  a  malicious  invention  of  Pope's  are  to 
be  counted  to  the  credit  of  the  latter.  But  Mr.  Saints- 
bury's  book  is  not  so  much  a  thorough  and  balanced  sur- 
vey of  eighteenth-century  literature  as  a  confession,  an 
almost  garrulous  monologue  on  the  delights  of  that  litera- 
ture. How  pleasant  and  unexpected  it  is  to  see  a  critic  in 
his  seventies  as  incautious,  as  pugnacious,  as  boisterous  as 
an  undergraduate!  It  is  seldom  that  we  find  the  apostolic 
spirit  of  youth  living  in  the  same  breast  with  the  riches  of 
experience  and  memory,  as  we  do  in  the  present  book. 

One  of  the  great  attractions  of  the  eighteenth  century  for 
the  modern  world  is  that,  while  it  is  safely  set  at  an  his- 
torical distance  from  us,  it  is,  at  the  same  time,  brought 
within  range  of  our  everyday  interests.  It  is  not  merely 
that  about  the  beginning  of  it  men  began  to  write  and  talk 
according  to  the  simple  rules  of  modern  times.  It  is  rather 
that  about  this  time  the  man  of  letters  emerges  from  the 
mists  of  legend  and  becomes  as  real  as  one's  uncle  in  his 
daily  passions  and  his  train  of  little  interests.  One  has  not 
to  reconstruct  the  lives  of  Swift  and  Pope  from  a  handful  of 
myths  and  references  in  legal  documents.  There  is  no  room 
for  anything  akin  to  Baconianism  in  their  regard.  They 
live  in  a  thousand  letters  and  contemporary  illusions,  and 
one  might  as  well  be  an  agnostic  about  Mr.  Asquith  as  about 
either  of  them.  Pope  was  a  champion  liar,  and  Swift 
spun  mystifications  about  himself.  But,  in  spite  of  lies  and 
mystifications  and  gossip,  they  are  both  as  real  to  us  as  if 
we  met  them  walking  down  the  Strand.  One  could  not 
easily  imagine  Shakespeare  walking  down  the  Strand.  The 
Strand  would  have  to  be  rebuilt,  and  the  rest  of  us  would 
have  to  put  on  fancy  dress  in  order  to  receive  him.  But 


174  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

though  Swift  and  Pope  lived  in  a  century  of  wig  and  powder 
and  in  a  London  strangely  unlike  the  London  of  to-day, 
we  do  not  feel  that  similar  preparations  would  be  needed  in 
their  case.  If  Swift  came  back,  one  can  without  difficulty 
imagine  him  pamphleteering  about  war  as  though  he  had 
merely  been  asleep  for  a  couple  of  centuries;  and  Pope,  we 
may  be  sure,  would  resume,  without  too  great  perplexity, 
his  attack  on  the  qgoists  and  dunces  of  the  world  of  letters. 
But  Shakespeare's  would  be  a  return  from  legendary 
Elysian  fields. 

Hence  Mr.  Saintsbury  may  justly  hope  that  his  summons 
to  the  modern  random  reader,  no  less  than  to  the  scholar, 
to  go  and  enjoy  himself  among  the  writers  of  the  eighteenth 
century  will  not  fall  on  entirely  deaf  ears.  At  the  same 
time,  it  is  only  fair  to  warn  the  general  reader  not  to  follow 
Mr.  Saintsbury's  recommendations  and  opinions  too  blindly. 
He  will  do  well  to  take  the  author's  advice  and  read  Pope, 
but  he  will  do  very  ill  to  take  the  author's  advice  as  regards 
what  in  Pope  is  best  worth  reading.  Mr.  Saintsbury  speaks 
with  respect,  for  instance,  of  the  Elegy  on  an  Unfortunate 
Lady — an  insincere  piece  of  tombstone  rhetoric.  "There 
are  some,"  he  declared  in  a  footnote,  "  to  whom  this  singu- 
lar piece  is  Pope's  strongest  atonement,  both  as  poet  and 
man,  for  his  faults  as  both."  It  seems  to  me  to  be  a 
poem  which  reveals  Pope's  faults  as  a  poet,  while  of  Pope 
the  man  it  tells  us  simply  nothing.  It  has  none  of  Pope's 
wit,  none  of  his  epigrammatic  characterization,  none  of  his 
bewigged  and  powdered  fancies,  none  of  his  malicious  self- 
revelation.  Almost  the  only  interesting  thing  about  it  is 
the  notes  the  critics  have  written  on  it,  discussing  whether 
the  lady  ever  lived,  and,  if  so,  whether  she  was  a  Miss 
Wainsbury  or  a  lady  of  title,  whether  she  was  beautiful  or 
deformed,  whether  she  was  in  love  with  Pope  or  the  Duke 
of  Buckingham  or  the  Due  de  Berry,  whether  Pope  was  in 
love  with  her,  or  even  knew  her,  or  whether  she  killed 
herself  with  a  sword  or  by  hanging  herself.  One  can  find 
plenty  of  "  rest  and  refreshment  "  among  the  conjectures 
of  the  commentators,  but  in  the  verse  itself  one  can  find 


TWO  ENGLISH  CRITICS  175 

little  but  a  good  example  of  the  technique  of  the  rhymed 
couplet.  But  Mr.  Saintsbury  evidently  loves  the  heroic 
couplet  for  itself  alone.  The  only  long  example  of  Pope's 
verse  which  he  quotes  is  merely  ding-dong,  and  might  have 
been  written  by  any  capable  imitator  of  the  poet  later  in 
the  century.  Surely,  if  his  contention  is  true  that  Pope's 
reputation  as  a  poet  is  now  lower  than  it  ought  to  be,  he 
ought  to  have  quoted  something  from  the  Epistle  to  Dr. 
Arbuthnot  or  The  Rape  of  the  Lock,  or  even  The  Essay  on 
Man.  The  two  first  are  almost  flawless  masterpieces.  Here 
Pope  suddenly  becomes  a  star.  Here  he  gilds  his  age  and 
his  passions  with  wit  and  fancy;  he  ceases  to  be  a. mere 
rhymed  moralist,  a  mechanician  of  metre.  Mr.  Saintsbury, 
I  regret  to  see,  contends  that  the  first  version  of  The  Rape 
of  the  Lock  is  the  best.  One  can  hardly  forgive  this 
throwing  overboard  of  the  toilet  and  the  fairies  which  Pope 
added  in  the  later  edition.  We  may  admit  that  the  gnomes 
are  a  less  happy  invention  than  the  sylphs,  and  that  their 
introduction  lets  the  poem  down  from  its  level  of  magic 
illusion.  But  in  the  second  telling  the  poem  is  an  infinitely 
richer  and  more  peopled  thing.  Had  we  only  known  the 
first  version,  we  should,  no  doubt,  have  felt  with  Addison 
that  it  was  madness  to  tamper  with  such  exquisite  perfec- 
tion. But  Pope,  who  foolishly  attributed  A'ddison's 
advice  to  envy,  proved  that  Addison  was  wrong.  His  revi- 
sion of  T]ie  Rape  of  the  Lock  is  one  of  the  few  magnifi- 
cently successful  examples  in  literature  of  painting  the  lily. 
One  differs  from  Mr.  Saintsbury,  however,  less  in  liking 
a  different  garden  from  his  than  in  liking  a  different  seat  in 
the  same  garden.  One  who  is  familiar  as  he  is  with  all  the 
literature  he  discusses  in  the  present  volume  is  bound  to 
indulge  all  manner  of  preferences,  whims  and  even  eccen- 
tricities. An  instance  of  Mr.  Saintsbury's  whims  is  his 
complaint  that  the  eighteenth-century  essays  are  almost 
always  reprinted  only  in  selections  and  without  the  adver- 
tisements that  appeared  with  them  on  their  first  publication. 
He  is  impatient  of  J.  R.  Green's  dismissal  of  the  periodical 


176  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

essayist  as  a  "  mass  of  rubbish,"  and  he  demands  his 
eighteenth-century  essayists  in  full,  advertisements  and  all. 
"  Here,"  he  insists,  "  these  things  fringe  and  vignette  the 
text  in  the  most  appropriate  manner,  and  so  set  off  the 
quaint  variety  and  the  other-worldly  character  as  nothing 
else  could  do."  Is  not  the  author's  contention,  however,  as 
to  the  great  loss  the  Addisonian  essay  suffers  when  isolated 
from  its  context  a  severe  criticism  on  that  essay  as  litera- 
ture? The  man  of  letters  likes  to  read  from  a  complete 
Spectator  as  he  does  from  a  complete  Wordsworth.  At  the 
same  time,  the  best  of  Addison,  as  of  Wordsworth,  can 
stand  on  its  own  feet  in  an  anthology,  and  this  is  the  final 
proof  of  its  literary  excellence.  The  taste  for  eighteenth- 
century  advertisements  is,  after  all,  only  literary  antiquar- 
ianism — a  delightful  indulgence,  a  by-path,  but  hardly  neces- 
sary to  the  enjoyment  of  Addison's  genius. 

But  it  is  neither  Pope  nor  Addison  who  is  ultimately 
Mr.  Saintsbury's  idol  among  the  poets  and  prose-writers  of 
the  eighteenth  century.  His  idol  of  idols  is  Swift,  and  next 
to  him  he  seems  most  wholeheartedly  to  love  and  admire 
Dr.  Johnson  and  Fielding.  He  makes  no  bones  about  con- 
fessing his  preference  of  Swift  to  Aristophanes  and  Rabelais 
and  Moliere.  Swift  does  not  at  once  fascinate  and  cold- 
shoulder  him  as  he  does  to  so  many  people.  Mr.  Saints- 
bury  glorifies  Gulliver,  and  wisely  so,  right  down  to  the 
last  word  about  the  Houyhnhnms,  and  he  demands  for 
the  Journal  to  Stella  recognition  as  "  the  first  great  novel, 
being  at  the  same  time  a  marvellous  and  absolutely  genuine 
autobiography."  His  ultimate  burst  of  appreciation  is  a 
beautifully  characteristic  example  of  what  has  before  been 
called  Saintsburyese — not  because  of  any  obscurity  in  it, 
but  because  of  its  oddity  of  phrase  and  metaphor: 

Swift  never  wearies,  for,  as  Bossuet  said  of  human  passion  gen- 
erally, there  is  in  this  greatest  master  of  one  of  its  most  terrible  forms, 
quelque  chose  d'infini,  and  the  refreshment  which  he  offers  varies 
unceasingly  from  the  lightest  froth  of  pure  nonsense,  through 
beverages  middle  and  stronger  to  the  most  drastic  restoratives — the 
very  strychnine  and  capsicum  of  irony. 


TWO  ENGLISH  CRITICS  177 

— ^— — — ——  j 

But  what,  above  all,  attracts  Mr.  Saintsbury  in  Swift, 
Fielding  and  Johnson  is  their  eminent  manliness.  He  is 
an  enthusiast  within  limits  for  the  genius  of  Sterne  and  the 
genius  of  Horace  Walpole.  But  he  loves  them  in  a  grudg- 
ing way.  He  is  disgusted  with  their  lack  of  muscle.  He 
admits  of  the  characters  in  Tristram  Shandy  that  "  they 
are  .  .  .  much  more  intrinsically  true  to  life  than  many,  if 
not  almost  all,  the  characters  of  Dickens,"  but  he  is  too 
greatly  shocked  by  Sterne's  humour  to  be  just  to  his  work 
as  a  whole.  It  is  the  same  with  Walpole' s  letters.  Mr. 
Saintsbury  will  heap  sentence  after  sentence  of  praise  upon 
them,  till  one  would  imagine  they  were  his  favourite 
eighteenth-century  literature.  He  even  defends  Walpole's 
character  against  Macaulay,  but  in  the  result  he  damns  him 
with  faint  praise  quite  as  effectively  as  Macaulay  did.  That 
he  has  an  enviable  appetite  for  Walpole's  letters  is  shown 
by  the  fact  that,  in  speaking  of  Mrs.  Toynbee's  huge  six- 
teen-volume  edition  of  them,  he  observes  that  "  even  a 
single  reading  of  it  will  supply  the  evening  requirements 
of  a  man  who  does  not  go  to  bed  very  late,  and  has  learnt 
the  last  lesson  of  intellectual  as  of  other  enjoyment — to 
enjoy  slowly — for  nearer  a  month  than  a  week,  and  perhaps 
for  longer  still."  The  man  who  can  get  through  Horace 
Walpole  in  a  month  of  evenings  without  sitting  up  late 
seems  to  me  to  be  endowed  not  only  with  an  avarice  of 
reading,  but  with  an  avarice  of  Walpole.  But,  in  spite  of 
this,  Mr.  Saintsbury  does  not  seem  to  like  his  author.  His 
ideal  author  is  one  of  whom  he  can  say,  as  he  does  of 
Johnson,  that  he  is  "  one  of  the  greatest  of  Englishmen, 
one  of  the  greatest  men  of  letters,  and  one  of  the  greatest 
of  men."  One  of  his  complaints  against  Gray  is  that, 
though  he  liked  Joseph  Andrews,  he  "  had  apparently  not 
enough  manliness  to  see  some  of  Fielding's  real  merits." 
As  for  Fielding,  Mr.  Saintsbury's  verdict  is  summed  up  in 
Dryden's  praise  of  Chaucer.  "Here  is  God's  plenty."  In 
Tom  Jones  he  contends  that  Fielding  "  puts  the  whole 
plant  of  the  pleasure-giver  in  motion,  as  no  novel-writer — 
not  even  Cervantes — had  ever  done  before."  For  myself, 


178  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

I  doubt  whether  the  exaltation  of  Fielding  has  not  become 
too  much  a  matter  of  orthodoxy  in  recent  years.  Compare 
him  with  Swift,  and  he  is  long-winded  in  his  sentences. 
Compare  him  with  Sterne,  and  his  characters  are  mechan- 
ical. Compare  him  with  Dickens,  and  he  reaches  none  of 
the  depths,  either  of  laughter  or  of  sadness.  This  is  not 
to  question  the  genius  of  Fielding's  vivid  and  critical  pic- 
ture of  eighteenth-century  manners  and  morals.  It  is 
merely  to  put  a  drag  on  the  wheel  of  Mr  Saintsbury's- gal- 
loping enthusiasm. 

But,  however  one  may  quarrel  with  it,  The  Peace  of  the 
Augustans  is  a  book  to  read  with  delight — an  eccentric 
book,  an  extravagant  book,  a  grumpy  book,  but  a  book  of 
rare  and  amazing  enthusiasm  for  good  literature.  Mr. 
Saintsbury's  constant  jibes  at  the  present  age,  as  though 
no  one  had  ever  been  unmanly  enough  to  make  a  joke 
before  Mr.  Shaw,  become  amusing  in  the  end  like  Dr. 
Johnson's  rudenesses.  And  Mr.  Saintsbury's  one  attempt 
to  criticize  contemporary  fiction — where  he  speaks  of  Sin- 
ister Street  in  the  same  breath  with  Waverley  and  Pride 
and  Prejudice — is  both  amusing  and  rather  appalling.  But, 
in  spite  of  his  attitude  to  his  own  times,  one  could  not  ask 
for  more  genial  company  on  going  on  a  pilgrimage  among 
the  Augustans.  Mr.  Saintsbury  has  in  this  book  written 
the  most  irresistible  advertisement  of  eighteenth-century 
literature  that  has  been  published  for  many  years. 

(2)   MR.  GOSSE 

Mr.  Gosse  and  Mr.  Saintsbury  are  the  two  kings  of 
Sparta  among  English  critics  of  to-day.  They  stand  pre- 
eminent among  those  of  our  contemporaries  who  have 
served  literature  in  the  capacity  of  law-givers  during  the 
past  fifty  years.  I  do  not  suggest  that  they  are  better  critics 
than  Mr.  Birrell  or  Sir  Sidney  Colvin  or  the  late  Sir  E.  T. 
Cook.  But  none  of  these  three  was  ever  a  professional  and 
whole-time  critic,  as  Mr.  Gosse  and  Mr.  Saintsbury  are. 
One  thinks  of  the  latter  primarily  as  the  authors  of  books 


TWO  ENGLISH  CRITICS  179 

about  books,  though  Mr.  Gosse  is  a  poet  and  biographer  as 
well,  and  Mr.  Saintsbury,  it  is  said,  once  dreamed  of  writing 
a  history  of  wine.  One  might  say  of  Mr.  Gosse  that  even  in 
his  critical  work  he  writes  largely  as  a  poet  and  biographer, 
while  Mr.  Saintsbury  writes  of  literature  as  though  he  were 
writing  a  history  of  wine.  Mr.  Saintsbury  seeks  in  litera- 
ture, above  all  things,  exhilarating  qualities.  He  can  read 
almost  anything  and  in  any  language,  provided  it  is  not 
non-intoxicating.  He  has  a  good  head,  and  it  cannot  be 
said  that  he  ever  allows  an  author  to  go  to  it.  But  the 
authors  whom  he  has  collected  in  his  wonderful  cellar  un- 
questionably make  him  merry.  In  his  books  he  always 
seems  to  be  pressing  on  us  "  another  glass  of  Jane  Austen," 
or  "  just  a  thimbleful  of  Pope,"  or  "  a  drop  of  '42  Tenny- 
son." No  other  critic  of  literature  writes  with  the  garrulous 
gusto  of  a  boon-companion  as  Mr.  Saintsbury  does.  In 
our  youth,  when  we  demand  style  as  well  as  gusto,  we 
condemn  him  on  account  of  his  atrocious  English.  As  we 
grow  older,  we  think  of  his  English  merely  as  a  rather 
eccentric  sort  of  coat,  and  we  begin  to  recognize  that 
geniality  such  as  his  is  a  part  of  critical  genius.  True,  he 
is  not  over-genial  to  new  authors.  He  regards  them  as  he 
might  1916  claret.  Perhaps  he  is  right.  Authors  un- 
doubtedly get  mellower  with  age.  Even  great  poetry  is, 
we  are  told,  a  little  crude  to  the  taste  till  it  has  stood  for  a 
few  seasons. 

Mr.  Gosse  is  at  once  more  grave  and  more  deferential  in 
his  treatment  of  great  authors.  One  cannot  imagine  Mr. 
Saintsbury  speaking  in  a  hushed  voice  before  Shakespeare 
himself.  One  can  almost  hear  him  saying,  "  Hullo, 
Shakespeare ! "  To  Mr.  Gosse,  however,  literature  is  an 
almost  sacred  subject.  He  glows  in  its  presence.  He  is 
more  lyrical  than  Mr.  Saintsbury,  more  imaginative  and 
more  eloquent.  His  short  history  of  English  literature  is 
a  book  that  fills  a  young  head  with  enthusiasm.  He  writes 
as  a  servant  of  the  great  tradition.  He  is  a  Whig,  where 
Mr.  Saintsbury  is  an  heretical  old  Jacobite.  He  is,  however, 
saved  from  a  professorial  earnestness  by  his  sharp  talent  for 


180  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

portraiture.  Mr.  Gosse's  judgments  may  or  may  not  last: 
his  portraits  certainly  will.  It  is  to  be  hoped  that  he  will 
one  day  write  his  reminiscences.  Such  a  book  would,  we 
feel  sure,  be  among  the  great  books  of  portraiture  in  the 
history  of  English  literature.  He  has  already  set  Patmore 
and  Swinburne  before  us  in  comic  reality,  and  who  can 
forget  the  grotesque  figure  of  Hans  Andersen,  sketched  in 
a  few  lines  though  it  is,  in  Two  Visits  to  Denmark?  It  may 
be  replied  that  Mr.  Gosse  has  already  given  us  the  best  of 
his  reminiscences  in  half  a  dozen  books  of  essay  and  bio- 
graphy. Even  so,  there  were  probably  many  things  which 
it  was  not  expedient  to  tell  ten  or  twenty  years  ago,  but 
which  might  well  be  related  for  the  sake  of  truth  and 
entertainment  to-day.  Mr.  Gosse  in  the  past  has  usually 
told  the  truth  about  authors  with  the  gentleness  of  a  modern 
dentist  extracting  a  tooth.  He  keeps  up  a  steady  conver- 
sation of  praise  while  doing  the  damage.  The  truth  is  out 
before  you  know.  One  becomes  suddenly  aware  that  the 
author  has  ceased  to  be  as  coldly  perfect  as  a  tailor's  model, 
and  is  a  queer-looking  creature  with  a  gap  in  his  jaw.  It  is 
possible  that  the  author,  were  he  alive,  would  feel  furious, 
as  a  child  sometimes  feels  with  the  dentist.  None  the  less, 
Mr.  Gosse  has  done  him  a  service.  The  man  who  extracts  a 
truth  is  as  much  to  be  commended  as  the  man  who  extracts 
a  tooth.  It  is  not  the  function  of  the  biographer  any  more 
than  it  is  that  of  a  dentist  to  prettify  his  subject.  Each  is 
an  enemy  of  decay,  a  furtherer  of  life.  There  is  such  a 
thing  as  painless  biography,  but  it  is  the  work  of  quacks. 
Mr.  Gosse  is  one  of  those  honest  dentists  who  reassure  you 
by  allowing  it  to  hurt  you  "  just  a  little." 

This  gift  for  telling  the  truth  is  no  small  achievement  in 
a  man  of  letters.  Literature  is  a  broom  that  sweeps  lies  out 
of  the  mind,  and  fortunate  is  the  man  who  wields  it.  Un- 
happily, while  Mr.  Gosse  is  daring  in  portraiture,  he  is  the 
reverse  in  comment.  In  comment,  as  his  writings  on  the 
war  showed,  he  will  fall  in  with  the  cant  of  the  times.  He 
can  see  through  the  cant  of  yesterday  with  a  sparkle  in  his 
eyes,  but  he  is  less  critical  of  the  cant  of  to-day.  He  is  at 


TWO  ENGLISH  CRITICS  181 

least  fond  of  throwing  out  saving  clauses,  as  when,  writing 
of  Mr.  Sassoon's  verse,  he  says :  "  His  temper  is  not  alto- 
gether to  be  applauded,  for  such  sentiments  must  tend  to 
relax  the  effort  of  the  struggle,  yet  they  can  hardly  be 
reproved  when  conducted  with  so  much  honesty  and  cour- 
age." Mr.  Gosse  again  writes  out  of  the  official  rather 
than  the  imaginative  mind  when,  speaking  of  the  war  poets, 
he  observes: 

It  was  only  proper  that  the  earliest  of  all  should  be  the  Poet 
Laureate's  address  to  England,  ending  with  the  prophecy : 

Much  suffering  shall  cleanse  thee! 

But  thou  through  the  flood 
Shall  win  to  salvation, 

To  Beauty  through  blood. 

Had  a  writer  of  the  age  of  Charles  II.  written  a  verse  like 
that,  Mr.  Gosse's  chortles  would  have  disturbed  the  somno- 
lent peace  of  the  House  of  Peers.  Even  if  it  had  been 
written  in  the  time  of  Albert  the  Good,  he  would  have 
rent  it  with  the  destructive  dagger  of  a  phrase.  As  it  is, 
one  is  not  sure  that  Mr.  Gosse  regards  this  appalling  scrap 
from  a  bad  hymnal  as  funny.  One  hopes  that  he  quoted  it 
with  malicious  intention.  But  did  he?  Was  it  not  Mr. 
Gosse  who  early  in  the  war  glorified  the  blood  that  was  being 
shed  as  a  cleansing  stream  of  Condy's  Fluid?  The  truth  is, 
apart  from  his  thoughts  about  literature,  Mr.  Gosse  thinks 
much  as  the  leader-writers  tell  him.  He  is  sensitive  to 
beauty  of  style  and  to  idiosyncrasy  of  character,  but  he  lacks 
philosophy  and  that  tragic  sense  that  gives  the  deepest  sym- 
pathy. That,  we  fancy,  is  why  we  would  rather  read  him 
on  Catherine  Trotter,  the  precursor  of  the  bluestockings, 
than  on  any  subject  connected  with  the  war. 

Two  of  the  most  interesting  chapters  in  Mr.  Gosse's 
Diversions  of  a  Man  of  Letters  are  the  essay  on  Catherine 
Trotter  and  that  on  "  the  message  of  the  Wartons."  Here 
he  is  on  ground  on  which  there  is  no  leader-writer  to  take 
him  by  the  hand  and  guide  him  into  saying  "  the  right 
thing."  He  writes  as  a  disinterested  scholar  and  an  enter- 


182  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

tainer.  He  forgets  the  war  and  is  amused.  How  many 
readers  are  there  in  England  who  know  that  Catherine 
Trotter  "  published  in  1693  a  c°Py  °^  verses  addressed  to 
Mr.  Bevil  Higgons  on  the  occasion  of  his  recovery  from  the 
smallpox,"  and  that  "  she  was  then  fourteen  years  of 
age  "  ?  How  many  know  even  that  she  wrote  a  blank-verse 
tragedy  in  five  acts,  called  Agnes  de  Cestro,  and  had  it 
produced  at  Drury  Lane  at  the  age  of  sixteen?  At  the 
age  of  nineteen  she  was  the  friend  of  Congreve,  and  was 
addressed  by  Farquhar  as  "  one  of  the  fairest  of  her  sex 
and  the  best  judge."  By  the  age  of  twenty-five,  however, 
she  had  apparently  written  herself  out,  so  far  as  the  stage 
was  concerned,  and  after  her  tragedy,  The  Revolution  in 
Sweden,  the  theatre  knows  her  no  more.  Though  described 
as  "  the  Sappho  of  Scotland  "  by  the  Queen  of  Prussia,  and 
by  the  Duke  of  Marlborough  as  "  the  wisest  virgin  I  ever 
knew,"  her  fame  did  not  last  even  as  long  as  her  life.  She 
married  a  clergyman,  wrote  on  philosophy  and  religion,  and 
lived  till  seventy.  Her  later  writings,  according  to  Mr. 
Gosse,  "  are  so  dull  that  merely  to  think  of  them  brings 
tears  into  one's  eyes."  Her  husband,  who  was  a  bit  of  a 
Jacobite,  lost  his  money  on  account  of  his  opinions,  even 
though — "  a  perfect  gentleman  at  heart — '  he  always  prayed 
for  the  King  and  Royal  Family  by  name.'  "  "  Meanwhile," 
writes  Mr.  Gosse,  "  to  uplift  his  spirits  in  this  dreadful 
condition,  he  is  discovered  engaged  upon  a  treatise  on  the 
Mosaic  deluge,  which  he  could  persuade  no  publisher  to 
print.  He  reminds  us  of  Dr.  Primrose  in  The  Vicar  of 
Wakefield,  and,  like  him,  Mr.  Cockburn  probably  had 
strong  views  on  the  Whistonian  doctrine."  Altogether  the 
essay  on  Catherine  Trotter  is  an  admirable  example  of  Mr. 
Gosse  in  a  playful  mood. 

The  study  of  Joseph  and  Thomas  Warton  as  "  two 
pioneers  of  romanticism"  is  more  serious  in  purpose,  and 
is  a  scholarly  attempt  to  discover  the  first  symptoms  of 
romanticism  in  eighteenth-century  literature.  Mr.  Gosse 
finds  in  The  Enthusiast,  written  by  Joseph  Warton  at  the 
age  of  eighteen,  "  the  earliest  expression  of  full  revolt 


TWO  ENGLISH  CRITICS  183 

against  the  classical  attitude  which  had  been  sovereign  in 
all  European  literature  for  nearly  a  century."  He  does  not 
pretend  that  it  is  a  good  poem,  but  "  here,  for  the  first  time, 
we  find  unwaveringly  emphasized  and  repeated  what  was 
entirely  new  in  literature,  the  essence  of  romantic  hysteria." 
It  is  in  Joseph  Warton,  according  to  Mr.  Gosse,  that  we 
first  meet  with  "  the  individualist  attitude  to  nature."  Read- 
ers of  Horace  Walpole's  letters,  however,  will  remember 
still  earlier  examples  of  the  romantic  attitude  to  nature. 
But  these  were  not  published  for  many  years  afterwards. 
The  other  essays  in  the  book  range  from  the  charm  of 
Sterne  to  the  vivacity  of  Lady  Dorothy  Nevill,  from  a 
eulogy  of  Poe  to  a  discussion  of  Disraeli  as  a  novelist.  The 
variety,  the  scholarship,  the  portraiture  of  the  book  make  it 
a  pleasure  to  read;  and,  even  when  Mr.  Gosse  flatters  in 
his  portraits,  his  sense  of  truth  impels  him  to  draw  the 
features  correctly,  so  that  the  facts  break  through  the  praise. 
The  truth  is  Mr.  Gosse  is  always  doing  his  best  to  balance 
the  pleasure  of  saying  the  best  with  the  pleasure  of  saying 
the  worst.  His  books  are  all  the  more  vital  because  they 
bear  the  stamp  of  an  appreciative  and  mildly  cruel  per- 
sonality. 


XIX.— AN  AMERICAN  CRITIC:   PROFESSOR 
IRVING  BABBITT 

IT  is  rather  odd  that  two  of  the  ablest  American  critics 
should  also  be  two  of  the  most  unsparing  enemies  of 
romanticism  in  literature.  Professor  Babbitt  and  Mr. 
Paul  Elmer  More  cannot  get  over  the  French  Revolution. 
They  seem  to  think  that  the  rights  of  man  have  poisoned 
literature.  One  suspects  that  they  have  their  doubts  even 
about  the  American  Revolution;  for  there,  too,  the  rights 
of  man  were  asserted  against  the  lust  of  power.  It  is  only 
fair  to  Professor  Babbitt  to  say  that  he  does  not  defend  the 
lust  of  power.  On  the  contrary,  he  damns  it,  and  explains 
it  as  the  logical  and  almost  inevitable  outcome  of  the 
rights  of  man!  The  steps  of  the  process  by  which  the 
change  is  effected  are  these.  First,  we  have  the  Rousseaus 
asserting  that  the  natural  man  is  essentially  good,  but  that 
he  has  been  depraved  by  an  artificial  social  system  imposed 
on  him  from  without.  Instead  of  the  quarrel  between  good 
and  evil  in  his  breast,  they  see  only  the  quarrel  between 
the  innate  good  in  man  and  his  evil  environment.  They 
hold  that  all  will  be  well  if  only  he  is  set  free — if  his  genius 
or  natural  impulses  are  liberated.  "  Rousseauism  is  ... 
an  emancipation  of  impulse — especially  of  the  impulse  of 
sex."  It  is  a  gospel  of  egoism  and  leaves  little  room  for 
conscience.  Hence  it  makes  men  mengalomaniacs,  and  the 
lust  for  dominion  is  given  its  head  no  less  than  the  lust  of 
the  flesh.  "  In  the  absence  of  ethical  discipline,"  writes 
Professor  Babbitt  in  Rousseau  and  Romanticism,  "  the  lust 
for  knowledge  and  the  lust  for  feeling  count  very  little, 
at  least  practically,  compared  with  the  third  main  lust  of 
human  nature — the  lust  for  power.  Hence  the  emergence 
of  that  most  sinister  of  all  types,  the  efficient  megalo- 
maniac." In  the  result  it  appears  that  not  only  Rousseau 

184 


AN  AMERICAN  CRITIC  185 

and  Hugo,  but  Wordsworth,  Keats,  and  Shelley,  helped 
to  bring  about  the  European  War!  Had  there  been  no 
wars,  no  tyrants,  and  no  lascivious  men  before  Rousseau, 
one  would  have  been  ready  to  take  Professor  Babbitt's 
indictment  more  seriously. 

Professor  Babbitt,  however,  has  a  serious  philosophic 
idea  at  the  back  of  all  he  says.  He  believes  that  man  at 
his  noblest  lives  the  life  of  obligation  rather  than  of 
impulse;  and  that  romantic  literature  discourages  him  in 
this.  He  holds  that  man  should  rise  from  the  plane  of 
nature  to  the  plane  of  humanism  or  the  plane  of  religion, 
and  that  to  live  according  to  one's  temperament,  as  the 
romanticists  preach,  is  to  sink  back  from  human  nature,  in 
the  best  sense,  to  animal  nature.  He  takes  the  view  that 
men  of  science  since  Bacon,  by  the  great  conquests  they 
have  made  in  the  material  sphere,  have  prepared  man  to 
take  the  romantic  and  boastful  view  of  himself.  "  If  men 
had  not  been  so  heartened  by  scientific  progress  they  would 
have  been  less  ready,  we  may  be  sure,  to  listen  to  Rousseau 
when  he  affirmed  that  they  were  naturally  good."  Not 
that  Professor  Babbitt  looks  on  us  as  utterly  evil  and 
worthy  of  damnation.  He  objects  to  the  gloomy  Jonathan- 
Edwards  view,  because  it  helps  to  precipitate  by  reaction 
the  opposite  extreme — "  the  boundless  sycophancy  of  human 
nature  from  which  we  are  now  suffering."  It  was,  per- 
haps, in  reaction  against  the  priests  that  Rousseau  made 
the  most  boastful  announcements  of  his  righteousness. 
"  Rousseau  feels  himself  so  good  that  he  is  ready,  as  he 
declares,  to  appear  before  the  Almighty  at  the  sound  of 
the  trump  of  the  Last  Judgment,  with  the  book  of  his  Con- 
fessions in  his  hand,  and  there  to  issue  a  challenge  to  the 
whole  human  race,  '  Let  a  single  one  assert  to  Thee  if  he 
dare :  "  I  am  better  than  that  man."  Rousseau  would 
have  been  saved  from  this  fustian  virtue,  Professor  Babbitt 
thinks,  if  he  had  accepted  either  the  classic  or  the  religious 
view  of  life:  for  the  classic  view  imposes  on  human  nature 
the  discipline  of  decorum,  while  the  religious  view  imposes 
the  discipline  of  humility.  Human  nature,  he  holds,  requires 


186  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

the  restrictions  of  the  everlasting  "  No."  Virtue  is  a 
struggle  within  iron  limitations,  not  an  easy  gush  of  feel- 
ing. At  the  same  time,  Professor  Babbitt  does  not  offer 
us  as  a  cure  for  our  troubles  the  decorum  of  the  Pharisees 
and  the  pseudo-classicists,  who  bid  us  obey  outward  rules 
instead  of  imitating  a  spirit.  He  wishes  our  men  of  letters 
to  rediscover  the  ethical  imagination  of  the  Greeks.  "  True 
classicism,"  he  observes,  "  does  not  rest  on  the  observance 
of  rules  or  the  imitation  of  modes,  but  on  an  immediate 
insight  into  the  universal."  The  romanticists,  he  thinks, 
cultivate  not  the  awe  we  find  in  the  great  writers,  but  mere 
wonder.  He  takes  Poe  as  a  typical  romanticist.  "It  is 
not  easy  to  discover  in  either  the  personality  or  writings  of 
Poe  an  atom  of  awe  or  reverence.  On  the  other  hand,  he 
both  experiences  wonder  and  seeks  in  his  art  to  be  a  pure 
wonder-smith." 

One  of  the  results  of  putting  wonder  above  awe  is  that 
the  romanticists  unduly  praise  the  ignorant — the  savage, 
the  peasant,  and  the  child.  Wordsworth  here  comes  in 
for  denunciation  for  having  hailed  a  child  of  six  as 
"Mighty  Prophet!  Seer  blest!"  Christ,  Professor  Bab- 
bitt tells  us,  praised  the  child  not  for  its  capacity  for  wonder, 
but  for  its  freedom  from  sin.  The  romanticist,  on  the 
other  hand,  loves  the  spontaneous  gush  of  wonder.  He 
loves  day-dreams,  Arcadianism,  fairy-tale  Utopianism.  He 
begins  with  an  uncontrolled  fancy  and  ends  with  an  uncon- 
trolled character.  He  tries  all  sorts  of  false  gods — nature- 
worship,  art-worship,  humanitarianism,  sentimentalism 
about  animals.  As  regards  the  last  of  these,  romanticism, 
according  to  the  author,  has  meant  the  rehabilitation  of  the 
ass,  and  the  Rousseauists  are  guilty  of  onolatry.  "  Medical 
men  have  given  a  learned  name  to  the  malady  of  those  who 
neglect  the  members  of  their  own  family  and  gush  over 
animals  (zoophilpsychosis).  But  Rousseau  already 
exhibits  this  '  psychosis.'  He  abandoned  his  five  children 
one  after  the  other,  but  had,  we  are  told,  an  unspeakable 
affection  for  his  dog."  As  for  the  worship  of  nature,  it 
leads  to  a  "  wise  passiveness  "  instead  of  the  wise  energy  of 


AN  AMERICAN  CRITIC  187 

knowledge  and  virtue,  and  tempts  man  to  idle  in  pantheistic 
reveries.  "  In  Rousseau  or  Walt  Whitman  it  amounts  to 
a  sort  of  ecstatic  animality  that  sets  up  as  a  divine  illumina- 
tion." Professor  Babbitt  distrusts  ecstasy  as  he  distrusts 
Arcadianism.  He  perceives  the  mote  of  Arcadianism  even 
in  "  the  light  that  never  was  on  sea  or  land."  He  has  no 
objection  to  a  "  return  to  nature,"  if  it  is  for  purposes  of 
recreation:  he  denounces  it,  however,  when  it  is  set  up  as 
a  cult  or  "  a  substitute  for  philosophy  and  religion."  He 
denounces,  indeed,  every  kind  of  "  painless  substitute  for 
genuine  spiritual  effort."  He  admires  the  difficult  virtues, 
and  holds  that  the  gift  of  sympathy  or  pity  or  fraternity 
is  in  their  absence  hardly  worth  having. 

On  points  of  this  kind,  I  fancy,  he  would  have  had  on 
his  side  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  Browning,  and  many  of 
the  other  "  Rousseauists "  whom  he  attacks.  Professor 
Babbitt,  however,  is  a  merciless  critic,  and  the  writers  of 
the  nineteenth  century,  who  seemed  to  most  of  us  veritable 
monsters  of  ethics,  are  to  him  simply  false  prophets  of 
romanticism  and  scientific  complacency.  "  The  nineteenth 
century,"  he  declares,  "  may  very  well  prove  to  have  been 
the  most  wonderful  and  the  least  wise  of  centuries."  He 
admits  the  immense  materialistic  energy  of  the  century, 
but  this  did  not  make  up  for  the  lack  of  a  genuine  philo- 
sophic insight  in  life  and  literature.  Man  is  a  morally  indo- 
lent animal,  and  he  was  never  more  so  than  when  he  was 
working  "  with  something  approaching  frenzy  according 
to  the  natural  law."  Faced  with  the  spectacle  of  a  roman- 
tic spiritual  sloth  accompanied  by  a  materialistic,  physical, 
and  even  intellectual  energy,  the  author  warns  us  that  "  the 
discipline  that  helps  a  man  to  self-mastery  is  found  to  have 
a  more  important  bearing  on  his  happiness  than  the  dis- 
cipline that  helps  him  to  a  mastery  of  physical  nature." 
He  sees  a  peril  to  our  civilization  in  our  absorption  in 
the  temporal  and  our  failure  to  discover  that  "  something 
abiding  "  on  which  civilization  must  rest.  He  quotes  Aris- 
totle's anti-romantic  saying  that  "  most  men  would  rather 


188  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

live  in  a  disorderly  than  in  a  sober  manner."  He  feels 
that  in  conduct,  politics,  and  the  arts,  we  have,  as  the 
saying  is,  "  plumped  for  "  the  disorderly  manner  to-day. 

His  book  is  a  very  useful  challenge  to  the  times,  though 
it  is  a  dangerous  book  to  put  in  the  hands  of  anyone  inclined 
to  Conservatism.  After  all,  romanticism  was  a  great  lib- 
erating force.  It  liberated  men,  not  from  decorum,  but 
from  pseudo-decorum — not  from  humility,  but  from  sub- 
serviency. It  may  be  admitted  that,  without  humility  and 
decorum  of  the  true  kind,  liberty  is  only  pseudo-liberty, 
equality  only  pseudo-equality,  and  fraternity  only  pseudo- 
fraternity.  I  am  afraid,  however,  that  in  getting  rid  of  the 
vices  of  romanticism  Professor  Babbitt  would  pour  away 
the  baby  with  the  bath  water. 

Where  Professor  Babbitt  goes  wrong  is  in  not  realizing 
that  romanticism  with  its  emphasis  on  rights  is  a  necessary 
counterpart  to  classicism  with  its  emphasis  on  duties.  Each 
of  them  tries  to  do  without  the  other.  The  most  notorious 
romantic  lovers  were  men  who  failed  to  realize  the  neces- 
sity of  fidelity,  just  as  the  minor  romantic  artists  to-day 
fail  to  realize  the  necessity  of  tradition.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  classicist-in-excess  prefers  a  world  in  which  men  pre- 
serve the  decorum  of  servants  to  a  world  in  which  they 
might  attain  to  the  decorum  of  equals.  Professor  Babbitt 
refers  to  the  pseudo-classical  drama  of  seventeenth-century 
France,  in  which  men  confused  nobility  of  language  with 
the  language  of  the  nobility.  He  himself  unfortunately  is 
not  free  from  similar  prejudices.  He  is  antipathetic,  so 
far  as  one  can  see,  to  any  movement  for  a  better  social 
system  than  we  already  possess.  He  is  definitely  in  reac- 
tion against  the  whole  forward  movement  of  the  last  two 
centuries.  He  has  pointed  out  certain  flaws  in  the  mod- 
erns, but  he  has  failed  to  appreciate  their  virtues.  Litera- 
ture to-day  is  less  noble  than  the  literature  of  Shakespeare, 
partly,  I  think,  because  men  have  lost  the  "  sense  of  sin." 
Without  the  sense  of  sin  we  cannot  have  the  greatest 
tragedy.  The  Greeks  and  Shakespeare  perceived  the  con- 
trast between  the  pure  and  the  impure,  the  noble  and  the 


AN  AMERICAN  CRITIC  189 

base,  as  no  writer  perceives  it  to-day.  Romanticism 
undoubtedly  led  to  a  confusion  of  moral  values.  On  the 
other  hand,  it  was  a  necessary  counterblast  to  formalism. 
In  the  great  books  of  the  world,  in  Isaiah  and  the  Gospels, 
the  best  elements  of  both  the  classic  and  the  romantic  are 
found  working  together  in  harmony.  If  Christ  were  living 
to-day,  is  Professor  Babbitt  quite  sure  that  he  himself 
would  not  have  censured  the  anthophilpsychosis  of  "  Con- 
sider the  lilies  of  the  field  "  ? 


XX.— GEORGIANS 

(l)    MR.    DE    LA    MARE 

MR.  WALTER  DE  LA  MARE  gives  us  no  Thames  of  song.  His 
genius  is  scarcely  more  than  a  rill.  But  how  the  rill  shines ! 
How  sweet  a  music  it  makes !  Into  what  lands  of  romance 
does  it  flow,  and  beneath  what  hedges  populous  with  birds ! 
It  seems  at  times  as  though  it  were  a  little  fugitive  stream 
attempting  to  run  as  far  away  as  possible  from  the  wilder- 
ness of  reality  and  to  lose  itself  in  quiet,  dreaming  places. 
There  never  were  shyer  songs  than  these. 

Mr.  de  la  Mare  is  at  the  opposite  pole  to  poets  so  robustly 
at  ease  with  experience  as  Browning  and  Whitman.  He 
has  no  cheers  or  welcome  for  the  labouring  universe  on  its 
march.  He  is  interested  in  the  daily  procession  only 
because  he  seeks  in  it  one  face,  one  figure.  He  is  love-sick 
for  love,  for  beauty,  and  longs  to  save  it  from  the  con- 
tamination of  the  common  world.  Like  the  lover  in  The 
Tryst,  he  dreams  always  of  a  secret  place  of  love  and  beauty 
set  solitarily  beyond  the  bounds  of  the  time  and  space  we 
know: 

Beyond  the  rumour  even  of  Paradise  come, 
There,  out  of  all  remembrance,  make  our  home : 
Seek  we  some  close  hid  shadow  for  our  lair, 
Hollowed  by  Noah's  mouse  beneath  the  chair 
Wherein  the  Omnipotent,  in  slumber  bound, 
Nods  till  the  piteous  Trump  of  Judgment  sound. 
Perchance  Leviathan  of  the  deep  sea 
Would  lease  a  lost  mermaiden's  grot  to  me, 
There  of  your  beauty  we  would  joyance  make — 
A  music  wistful  for  the  sea-nymph's  sake : 
Haply  Elijah,  o'er  his  spokes  of  fire, 
Cresting  steep  Leo,  or  the  Heavenly  Lyre, 
Spied,  tranced  in  azure  of  inanest  space, 
Some  eyrie  hostel  meet  for  human  grace, 
Where  two  might  happy  be — just  you  and  I — 
Lost  in  the  uttermost  of  Eternity. 
190 


GEORGIANS  191 


This  is,  no  doubt,  a  far  from  rare  mood  in  poetry.  Even 
the  waltz-songs  of  the  music-halls  express,  or  attempt  to 
express,  the  longing  of  lovers  for  an  impossible  loneliness. 
Mr.  de  la  Mare  touches  our  hearts,  however,  not  because  he 
shares  our  sentimental  day-dreams,  but  because  he  so  mourn- 
fully turns  back  from  them  to  the  bitterness  of  reality : 

No,  no.    Nor  earth,  nor  air,  nor  fire,  nor  deep 
Could  lull  poor  mortal  longingness  asleep. 
Somewhere  there  Nothing  is ;  and  there  lost  Man 
Shall  win  what  changeless  vague  of  peace  he  can. 

These  lines  (ending  in  an  unsatisfactory  and  ineffective 
vagueness  of  phrase,  which  is  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  peculiar 
vice  as  a  poet)  suggests  something  of  the  sad  philosophy 
which  runs  through  the  verse  in  Motley.  The  poems  are, 
for  the  most  part,  praise  of  beauty  sought  and  found  in  the 
shadow  of  death. 

Melancholy  though  it  is,  however,  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  book 
is,  as  we  have  said,  a  book  of  praise,  not  of  lamentations. 
He  triumphantly  announces  that,  if  he  were  to  begin  to 
write  of  earth's  wonders: 

Flit  would  the  ages 
On  soundless  wings 
Ere  unto  Z 
My  pen  drew  nigh; 
Leviathan  told, 
And  the  honey-fly. 
. 
He  cannot  come  upon  a  twittering  linnet,  a  "  thing  of 

light,"  in  a  bush  without  realizing  that — 

All  the  throbbing  world 

Of  dew  and  sun  and  air 
By  this  small  parcel  of  life 

Is  made  more  fair. 

He  bids  us  in  Farewell: 

Look  thy  last  on  all  things  lovely 

Every  hour.     Let  no  night 
Seal  thy  sense  in  deathly  slumber 

Till  to  delight 
Thou  have  paid  thy  utmost  blessing. 


192  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

Thus,  there  is  nothing  faint-hearted  in  Mr.  de  la  Mare's 
melancholy.  His  sorrow  is  idealist's  sorrow.  He  has  the 
heart  of  a  worshipper,  a  lover. 

We  find  evidence  of  this  not  least  in  his  war-verses.  At 
the  outbreak  of  the  war  he  evidently  shared  with  other  lovers 
and  idealists  the  feeling  of  elation  in  the  presence  of  noble 
sacrifices  made  for  the  world. 

Now  each  man's  mind  all  Europe  is, 

he  cries,  in  the  first  line  in  Happy  England,  and,  as  he 
remembers  the  peace  of  England,  "  her  woods  and  wilds, 
her  loveliness,"  he  exclaims: 

O  what  a  deep  contented  night 
The  sun  from  out  her  Eastern  seas 

Would  bring  the  dust  which  in  her  sight 
Had  given  its  all  for  these! 

So  beautiful  a  spirit  as  Mr.  de  la  Mare's,  however,  could 
not  remain  content  with  idealizing  from  afar  the  sacrifices 
and  heroism  of  dying  men.  In  the  long  poem  called 
Motley  he  turns  from  the  heroism  to  the  madness  of  war, 
translating  his  vision  into  a  fool's  song : 

Nay,  but  a  dream  I  had 

Of  a  world  all  mad, 

Not  simply  happy  mad  like  me, 

Who  am  mad  like  an  empty  scene 

Of  water  and  willow-tree, 

Where  the  wind  hath  been ; 

But  that  foul  Satan-mad, 

Who  rots  in  his  own  head.  .    .   . 

The  fool's  vision  of  men  going  into  battle  is  not  a  vision 
of  knights  of  the  Holy  Ghost  nobly  falling  in  the  lists  with 
their  country  looking  on,  but  of  men's  bodies — 

Dragging  cold  cannon  through  a  mire 
Of  rain  and  blood  and  spouting  fire, 
The  new  moon  glinting  hard  on  eyes 
Wide  with  insanities ! 

In  The  Marionettes  Mr.  de  la  Mare  turns  to  tragic  satire  for 
relief  from  the  bitterness  of  a  war-maddened  world : 


GEORGIANS  193 


Let  the  foul  scene  proceed : 

There's  laughter  in  the  wings; 
"Pis  sawdust  that  they  bleed, 

But  a  box  Death  brings. 

How  rare  a  skill  is  theirs 

These  extreme  pangs  to  show, 
How  real  a  frenzy  wears 

Each  feigner  of  woe  1 

And  the  poem  goes  on  in  perplexity  of  anger  and  anguish: 

Strange,  such  a  Piece  is  free, 

While  we  spectators  sit, 
Aghast  at  its  agony, 

Yet  absorbed  in  it ! 

Dark  is  the  outer  air, 

Coldly  the  night  draughts  blow, 
Mutely  we  stare,  and  stare, 

At  the  frenzied  Show. 

Yet  Heaven  hath  its  quiet  shroud 

Of  deep,  immutable  blue — 
We  cry,  "  The  end  !  "    We  are  bowed 

By  the  dread,  "  'Tis  true !  " 

While  the  Shape  who  hoofs  applause 

Behind  our  deafened  ear, 
Hoots — angel-wise — "  the  Cause  "  1 

And  affrights  even  fear. 

There  is  something  in  these  lines  that  reminds  one  of  Mr. 
Thomas  Hardy's  black-edged  indictment  of  life. 

As  we  read  Mr.  de  la  Mare,  indeed,  we  are  reminded 
again  and  again  of  the  work  of  many  other  poets — of  the 
ballad-writers,  the  Elizabethan  song-writers,  Blake  and 
Wordsworth,  Mr.  Hardy  and  Mr.  W.  B.  Yeats.  In  some 
instances  it  is  as  though  Mr.  de  la  Mare  had  deliberately  set 
himself  to  compose  a  musical  variation  on  the  same  theme 
as  one  of  the  older  masters.  Thus,  April  Moon,  which 
contains  the  charming  verse — 

The  little  moon  that  April  brings, 

More  lovely  shade  than  light, 
That,  setting,  silvers  lonely  hills 

Upon  the  verge  of  night " — 


194  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

is  merely  Wordsworth's  "  She  dwelt  among  the  untrodden 
ways  "  turned  into  new  music.  New  music,  we  should  say, 
is  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  chief  gift  to  literature — a  music  not 
regular  or  precise  or  certain,  but  none  the  less  a  music  in 
which  weak  rhymes  and  even  weak  phrases  are  jangled  into 
a  strange  beauty,  as  in  Alexander,  which  begins: 

It  was  the  Great  Alexander, 

Capped  with  a  golden  helm, 
Sate  in  the  ages,  in  his  floating  ship, 

In  a  dead  calm. 

One  finds  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  characteristic,  unemphatic  music 
again  in  the  opening  lines  of  Mrs.  Grundy  : 

Step  very  softly,  sweet  Quiet-foot, 
Stumble  not,  whisper  not,  smile  not, 

where  "  foot "  and  "  not  "  are  rhymes. 

It  is  the  stream  of  music  flowing  through  his  verses  rather 
than  any  riches  of  imagery  or  phrase  that  makes  one  rank 
the  author  so  high  among  living  poets.  But  music  in  verse 
can  hardly  be  separated  from  intensity  and  sincerity  of 
vision.  This  music  of  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  is  not  a  mere  crafts- 
man's tune:  it  is  an  echo  of  the  spirit.  Had  he  not  seen 
beautiful  things  passionately,  Mr.  de  la  Mare  could  never 
have  written : 

Thou  with  thy  cheek  on  mine, 
And  dark  hair  loosed,  shalt  see 
Take  the  far  stars  for  fruit 
The  cypress  tree, 
And  in  the  yew's  black 
Shall  the  moon  be. 

Beautiful  as  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  vision  is,  however,  and 
beautiful  as  is  his  music,  we  miss  in  his  work  that  frequent 
perfection  of  phrase  which  is  part  of  the  genius  of  (to  take 
another  living  writer)  Mr.  Yeats.  One  has  only  to  compare 
Mr.  Yeats's  /  Heard  the  Old,  Old  Men  Say  with  Mr.  de  la 
Mare's  The  Old  Men  to  see  how  far  the  latter  falls  below 
verbal  mastery.  Mr.  Yeats  has  found  the  perfect  embodi- 


GEORGIANS  195 


ment  for  his  imagination.  Mr.  de  la  Mare  seems  in  com- 
parison to  be  struggling  with  his  medium,  and  contrives  in 
his  first  verse  to  be  no  more  than  just  articulate : 

Old  and  alone,  sit  we, 

Caged,  riddle-rid  men, 
Lost  to  earth's  "Listen!"  and  "See!" 

Thought's  "Wherefore?"  and  "When?" 

There  is  vision  in  some  of  the  later  verses  in  the  poem,  but, 
if  we  read  it  alongside  of  Mr.  Yeats's,  we  get  an  impression 
of  unsuccess  of  execution.  Whether  one  can  fairly  use  the 
word  "  unsuccess  "  in  reference  to  verse  which  succeeds  so 
exquisitely  as  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  in  being  literature  is  a  nice 
question.  But  how  else  is  one  to  define  the  peculiar  quality 
of  his  style — its  hesitations,  its  vaguenesses,  its  obscurities? 
On  the  other  hand,  even  when  his  lines  leave  the  intellect 
puzzled  and  the  desire  for  grammar  unsatisfied,  a  breath  of 
original  romance  blows  through  them  and  appeals  to  us  like 
the  illogical  burden  of  a  ballad.  Here  at  least  are  the 
rhythms  and  raptures  of  poetry,  if  not  always  the  beaten 
gold  of  speech.  Sometimes  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  verse  reminds 
one  of  piano-music,  sometimes  of  bird-music :  it  wavers  so 
curiously  between  what  is  composed  and  what  is  unsophis- 
ticated. Not  that  one  ever  doubts  for  a  moment  that  Mr. 
de  la  Mare  has  spent  on  his  work  an  artist's  pains.  He 
has  made  a  craft  out  of  his  innocence.  If  he  produces  in  his 
verse  the  effect  of  the  wind  among  the  reeds,  it  is  the  result 
not  only  of  his  artlessness,  but  of  his  art.  He  is  one  of  the 
modern  poets  who  have  broken  away  from  the  metrical 
formalities  of  Swinburne  and  the  older  men,  and  who,  of  set 
purpose,  have  imposed  upon  poetry  the  beauty  of  a  slightly 
irregular  pulse. 

He  is  typical  of  his  generation,  however,  not  only  in 
his  form,  but  in  the  pain  of  his  unbelief  (as  shown  in 
Betrayal},  and  in  that  sense  of  half-revelation  that  fills  him 
always  with  wonder  and  sometimes  with  hope.  His  poems 
tell  of  the  visits  of  strange  presences  in  dream  and  vacancy. 
In  A  Vacant  Day,  after  describing  the  beauty  of  a  summer 


196  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

moon,  with  clear  waters  flowing  under  willows,  he  closes 
with  the  verses : 

I  listened;  and  my  heart  was  dumb 
With  praise  no  language  could  express ; 

Longing  in  vain  for  him  to  come 
Who  had  breathed  such  blessedness. 

On  this  fair  world,  wherein  we  pass 

So  chequered  and  so  brief  a  stay, 
And  yearned  in  spirit  to  learn,  alas ! 

What  kept  him  still  away. 

In  these  poems  we  have  the  genius  of  the  beauty  of  gentle- 
ness expressing  itself  as  it  is  doing  nowhere  else  just  now 
in  verse.  Mr.  de  la  Mare's  poetry  is  not  only  lovely,  but 
lovable.  He  has  a  personal  possession — 

The  skill  of  words  to  sweeten  despair, 

such  as  will,  we  are  confident,  give  him  a  permanent  place 
in  English  literature. 


(2)  THE  GROUP 

The  latest  collection  of  Georgian  verse  has  had  a  mixed 
reception.  One  or  two  distinguished  critics  have  written  of 
it  in  the  mood  of  a  challenge  to  mortal  combat.  Men  have 
begun  to  quarrel  over  the  question  whether  we  are  living  in 
an  age  of  poetic  dearth  or  of  poetic  plenty — whether  the 
world  is  a  nest  of  singing-birds  or  a  cage  in  which  the  last 
canary  has  been  dead  for  several  years. 

All  this,  I  think,  is  a  good  sign.  It  means  that  poetry  is 
interesting  people  sufficiently  to  make  them  wish  to  argue 
about  it.  Better  a  breeze — even  a  somewhat  excessive  breeze 
— than  stagnant  air.  It  is  good  both  for  poets  and  for  the 
reading  public.  It  prevents  the  poets  from  resting  on  their 
wings,  as  they  might  be  tempted  to  do  by  a  consistent  calm 
of  praise.  It  compels  them  to  examine  their  work  more 
critically.  Anyhow,  "  fame  is  no  plant  that  grows  on  mortal 
soil,"  and  a  reasonable  amount  of  sharp  censure  will  do  a 
true  poet  more  good  than  harm.  It  will  not  necessarily 


GEORGIANS  197 


injure  even  his  sales.  I  understand  the  latest  volume  of 
Georgian  Poetry  is  already  in  greater  demand  than  its  prede- 
cessor. 

It  is  a  good  anthology  of  the  poetry  of  the  last  two  years 
without  being  an  ideal  anthology.  Some  good  poets  and 
some  good  poems  have  been  omitted.  And  they  have  been 
omitted,  in  some  instances,  in  favour  of  inferior  work. 
Many  of  us  would  prefer  an  anthology  of  the  best  poems 
rather  than  an  anthology  of  authors.  At  the  same  time, 
with  all  its  faults,  Georgian  Poetry  still  remains  the  best 
guide  we  possess  to  the  poetic  activities  of  the  time.  I 
am  glad  to  see  that  the  editor  includes  the  work  of  a  woman 
in  his  new  volume.  This  helps  to  make  it  more  representa- 
tive than  the  previous  selections.  But  there  are  several 
other  living  women  who  are  better  poets,  at  the  lowest 
estimate,  than  at  least  a  quarter  of  the  men  who  have  gained 
admission. 

Mr.  W.  H.  Davies  is  by  now  a  veteran  among  the 
Georgians,  and  one  cannot  easily  imagine  a  presence  more 
welcome  in  a  book  of  verse.  Among  poets  he  is  a  bird 
singing  in  a  hedge.  He  communicates  the  same  sense  of 
freshness  while  he  sings.  He  has  also  the  quick  eye  of  a 
bird.  He  is,  for  all  his  fairy  music,  on  the  look-out  for 
things  that  will  gratify  his  appetite.  He  looks  to  the  earth 
rather  than  the  sky,  though  he  is  by  no  means  deaf  to  the 
lark  that 

Raves  in  his  windy  heights  above  a  cloud. 

At  the  same  time,  at  his  best,  he  says  nothing  about  his 
appetite,  and  sings  in  the  free  spirit  of  a  child  at  play.  His 
best  poems  are  songs  of  innocence.  At  least,  that  is  the 
predominant  element  in  them.  He  warned  the  public  in  a 
recent  book  that  he  is  not  so  innocent  as  he  sounds.  But 
his  genius  certainly  is.  He  has  written  greater  poems  than 
any  that  are  included  in  the  present  selection.  Birds,  how- 
ever, is  a  beautiful  example  of  his  gift  for  joy.  We  need 
not  fear  for  contemporary  poetry  while  the  hedges  contain 
a  poet  such  as  Mr.  Davies. 


198  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

Mr.  de  la  Mare  does  not  sing  from  a  hedge.  He  is  a 
child  of  the  arts.  He  plays  an  instrument.  His  music  is 
the  music  of  a  lute  of  which  some  of  the  strings  have  been 
broken.  It  is  so  extraordinarily  sweet,  indeed,  that  one  has 
to  explain  him  to  oneself  as  the  perfect  master  of  an  im- 
perfect instrument.  He  is  at  times  like  Watts's  figure  of 
Hope  listening  to  the  faint  music  of  the  single  string  that 
remains  unbroken.  There  is  always  some  element  of  hope, 
or  of  some  kindred  excuse  for  joy,  even  in  his  deepest 
melancholy.  But  it  is  the  joy  of  a  spirit,  not  of  a  "  super- 
tramp."  Prospero  might  have  summoned  just  such  a  spirit 
through  the  air  to  make  music  for  him.  And  Mr.  de  la 
Mare's  is  a  spirit  perceptible  to  the  ear  rather  than  to  the 
eye.  One  need  not  count  him  the  equal  of  Campion  in  order 
to  feel  that  he  has  something  of  Campion's  beautiful  genius 
for  making  airs  out  of  words.  He  has  little  enough  of  the 
Keatsian  genius  for  choosing  the  word  that  has  the  most 
meaning  for  the  seeing  imagination.  But  there  is  a  secret 
melody  in  his  words  that,  when  once  one  has  recognized  it, 
one  can  never  forget. 

How  different  the  Georgian  poets  are  from  each  other 
may  be  seen  if  we  compare  three  of  the  best  poems  in  this 
book,  all  of  them  on  similar  subjects — Mr.  Davies's  Birds, 
Mr.  de  la  Mare's  Linnet,  and  Mr.  Squire's  Birds.  Mr. 
Squire  would  feel  as  out  of  place  in  a  hedge  as  would 
Mr.  de  la  Mare.  He  has  an  aquiline  love  of  soaring  and 
surveying  immense  tracts  with  keen  eyes.  He  loves  to 
explore  both  time  and  the  map,  but  he  does  this  without, 
losing  his  eyehold  on  the  details  of  the  Noah's  Ark  of  life 
on  the  earth  beneath  him.  He  does  not  lose  himself  in 
vaporous  abstractions;  his  eye,  as  well  as  his  mind,  is 
extraordinarily  interesting.  This  poem  of  his,  Birds,  is 
peopled  with  birds.  We  see  them  in  flight  and  in  their 
nests.  At  the  same  time,  the  philosophic  wonder  of  Mr. 
Squire's  poem  separates  him  from  Mr.  Davies  and  Mr.  de 
la  Mare.  Mr.  Davies,  I  fancy,  loves  most  to  look  at  birds; 
Mr.  de  la  Mare  to  listen  to  birds;  Mr.  Squire  to  brood  over 
them  with  the  philosophic  imagination.  It  would,  of  course, 


GEORGIANS  199 


be  absurd  to  offer  this  as  a  final  statement  of  the  poetic 
attitude  of  the  three  writers.  It  is  merely  an  attempt  to 
differentiate  among  them  with  the  help  of  a  prominent 
characteristic  of  each. 

The  other  poets  in  the  collection  include  Mr.  Robert 
Graves  (with  his  pleasant  bias  towards  nursery  rhymes), 
Mr.  Sassoon  (with  his  sensitive,  passionate  satire),  and 
Mr.  Edward  Shanks  (with  his  trembling  responsiveness  to 
beauty).  It  is  the  first  time  that  Mr.  Shanks  appears  among 
the  Georgians,  and  his  Night  Piece  and  Glow-worm  both 
show  how  exquisite  is  his  sensibility.  He  differs  from  the 
other  poets  by  his  quasi-analytic  method.  He  seems  to  be 
analyzing  the  beauty  of  the  evening  in  both  these  poems. 
Mrs.  Shove's  A  Man  'Dreams  that  He  is  the  Creator  is  a 
charming  example  of  fancy  toying  with  a  great  theme. 

(3)    THE   YOUNG   SATIRISTS 

Satire,  it  has  been  said,  is  an  ignoble  art;  and  it  is 
probable  that  there  are  no  satirists  in  Heaven.  Probably 
there  are  no  doctors  either.  Satire  and  medicine  are  our 
responses  to  a  diseased  world — to  our  diseased  selves.  They 
are  responses,  however,  that  make  for  health.  Satire  holds 
the  medicine-glass  up  to  human  nature.  It  also  holds  the 
mirror  up  in  a  limited  way.  It  does  not  show  a  man  what  he 
looks  like  when  he  is  both  well  and  good.  It  does  show  a  man 
what  he  looks  like,  however,  when  he  breaks  out  into  spots 
or  goes  yellow,  pale,  or  mottled  as  a  result  of  making  a  beast 
of  himself.  It  reflects  only  sick  men;  but  it  reflects  them 
with  a  purpose.  It  would  be  a  crime  to  permit  it,  if  the 
world  were  a  hospital  for  incurables.  To  write  satire  is  an 
act  of  faith,  not  a  luxurious  exercise.  The  despairing  Swift 
was  a  fighter,  as  the  despairing  A'natole  France  is  a  fighter. 
They  may  have  uttered  the  very  Z  of  melancholy  about  the 
animal  called  man;  but  at  least  they  were  sufficiently 
optimistic  to  write  satires  and  to  throw  themselves  into 
defeated  causes. 

It  would  be  too  much  to  expect  of  satire  that  it  alone  will 


200  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

cure  mankind  of  the  disease  of  war.  It  is  a  good  sign, 
however,  that  satires  on  war  have  begun  to  be  written.  War 
has  affected  with  horror  or  disgust  a  number  of  great 
imaginative  writers  in  the  last  two  or  three  thousand  years. 
The  tragic  indictment  of  war  in  The  Trojan  Women  and 
the  satiric  indictment  in  The  Voyage  to  the  Houyhnhnms 
are  evidence  that  some  men  at  least  saw  through  the  romance 
of  war  before  the  twentieth  century.  In  the  war  that  has 
just  ended,  however — or  that  would  have  ended  if  the  Peace 
Conference  would  let  it — we  have  seen  an  imaginative  revolt 
against  war,  not  on  the  part  of  mere  men  of  letters,  but  on 
the  part  of  soldiers.  Ballads  have  survived  from  other  wars, 
depicting  the  plight  of  the  mutilated  soldier  left  to  beg: 

You  haven't  an  arm  and  you  haven't  a  leg, 
You're  an  eyeless,  noseless,  chickenless  egg, 
You  ought  to  be  put  in  a  bowl  to  beg — 
Och,  Johnnie,  I  hardly  knew  you ! 

But  the  recent  war  has  produced  a  literature  of  indictment, 
basing  itself  neither  on  the  woes  of  women  nor  on  the 
wrongs  of  ex-soldiers,  but  on  the  right  of  common  men  not 
to  be  forced  into  mutual  murder  by  statesmen  who  them- 
selves never  killed  anything  more  formidable  than  a 
pheasant.  Soldiers — or  some  of  them — see  that  wars  go  on 
only  because  the  people  who  cause  them  do  not  realize  what 
war  is  like.  I  do  not  mean  to  suggest  that  the  kings, 
statesmen  and  journalists  who  bring  wars  about  would  not 
themselves  take  part  in  the  fighting  rather  than  that  there 
should  be  no  fighting  at  all.  The  people  who  cause  wars, 
however,  are  ultimately  the  people  who  endure  kings, 
statesmen  and  journalists  of  the  exploiting  and  bullying 
kind.  The  satire  of  the  soldiers  is  an  appeal  not  to  the 
statesmen  and  journalists,  but  to  the  general  imagination 
of  mankind.  It  is  an  attempt  to  drag  our  imaginations 
away  from  the  heroics  of  the  senate-house  into  the  filth  of 
the  slaughter-house.  It  does  not  deny  the  heroism  that  exists 
in  the  slaughter-house  any  more  than  it  denies  the  heroism 
that  exists  in  the  hospital  ward.  But  it  protests  that,  just  as 


GEORGIANS  201 


the  heroism  of  a  man  dying  of  cancer  must  not  be  taken  to 
justify  cancer,  so  the  heroism  of  a  million  men  dying  of 
war  must  not  be  taken  to  justify  war.  There  are  some  who 
believe  that  neither  war  nor  cancer  is  a  curable  disease. 
One  thing  we  can  be  sure  of  in  this  connection :  we  shall 
never  get  rid  either  of  war  or  of  cancer  if  we  do  not  learn  to 
look  at  them  realistically  and  see  how  loathsome  they  are. 
So  long  as  war  was  regarded  as  inevitable,  the  poet  was 
justified  in  romanticizing  it,  as  in  that  epigram  in  the  Greek 
Anthology : 

Demaetia  sent  eight  sons  to  encounter  the  phalanx  of  the  foe,  and 
she  buried  them  all  beneath  one  stone.  No  tear  did  she  shed  in  her 
mourning,  but  said  this  only :  "  Ho,  Sparta,  I  bore  these  children  for 
thee." 

As  soon  as  it  is  realized,  however,  that  wars  are  not  inevi- 
table, men  cease  to  idealize  Demaetia,  unless  they  are  sure 
she  did  her  best  to  keep  the  peace.  To  a  realistic  poet  of 
war  such  as  Mr.  Sassoon,  she  is  an  object  of  pity  rather 
than  praise.  His  sonnet,  Glory  of  Women,  suggests  that 
there  is  another  point  of  view  besides  Demaetia's : 

You  love  us  when  we're  heroes,  home  on  leave, 

Or  wounded  in  a  mentionable  place. 

You  worship  decorations ;  you  believe 

That  chivalry  redeems  the  war's  disgrace. 

You  make  us  shells.    You  listen  with  delight, 

By  tales  of  dirt  and  danger  fondly  thrilled. 

You  crown  our  distant  ardours  while  we  fight, 

And  mourn  our  laurelled  memories  when  we're  killed. 

You  can't  believe  that  British  troops  "  retire  " 
When  hell's  last  horror  breaks  them,  and  they  run, 
Trampling  the  terrible  corpses — blind  with  blood. 
O  German  mother  dreaming  by  the  fire, 
While  you  are  knitting  socks  to  send  your  son 
His  face  is  trodden  deeper  in  the  mud. 

To  Mr.  Sassoon  and  the  other  war  satirists,  indeed,  those 
who  stay  at  home  and  incite  others  to  go  out  and  kill  or  get 
killed  seem  either  pitifully  stupid  or  pervertedly  criminal. 
Mr.  Sassoon  has  now  collected  all  his  war  poems  into  one 
volume,  and  one  is  struck  by  the  energetic  hatred  of  those 


202  TEE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

who  make  war  in  safety  that  finds  expression  in  them.  Most 
readers  will  remember  the  bitter  joy  of  the  dream  that  one 
day  he  might  hear  "  the  yellow  pressmen  grunt  and  squeal," 
and  see  the  Junkers  driven  out  of  Parliament  by  the  returned 
soldiers.  Mr.  Sassoon  cannot  endure  the  enthusiasm  of  the 
stay-at-home — especially  the  enthusiasm  that  pretends  that 
soldiers  not  only  behave  like  music-hall  clowns,  but  are 
incapable  of  the  more  terrible  emotional  experiences.  He 
would  like,  I  fancy,  to  forbid  civilians  to  make  jokes  during 
war-time.  His  hatred  of  the  jesting  civilian  attains  pas- 
sionate expression  in  the  poem  called  Blighters : 

The  House  is  crammed :  tier  beyond  tier  they  grin 
And  cackle  at  the  Show,  while  prancing  ranks 
Of  harlots  shrill  the  chorus,  drunk  with  din ; 
"  We're  sure  the  Kaiser  loves  the  dear  old  Tanks ! " 

I'd  like  to  see  a  Tank  come  down  the  stalls, 
Lurching  to  rag-time  tunes,  or  "  Home,  sweet  Home," — 
And  there'd  be  no  more  jokes  in  Music-halls 
To  mock  the  riddled  corpses  round  Bapaume. 

Mr.  Sassoon  himself  laughs  on  occasion,  but  it  is  the 
laughter  of  a  man  being  driven  insane  by  an  insane  world. 
The  spectacle  of  lives  being  thrown  away  by  the  hundred 
thousand  by  statesmen  and  generals  without  the  capacity  to 
run  a  village  flower-show,  makes  him  find  relief  now  and 
then  in  a  hysteria  of  mirth,  as  in  The  General: 

"  Good-morning ;  good-morning !  "  the  General  said 
When  we  met  him  last  week  on  our  way  to  the  Line, 
Now  the  soldiers  he  smiled  at  are  most  of  'em  dead, 
And  we're  cursing  his  staff  for  incompetent  swine. 
"  He's  a  cheery  old  card,"  grunted  Harry  to  Jack 
As  they  slogged  up  to  Arras  with  rifle  and  pack. 
*  *  *  *  * 

But  he  did  for  them  both  by  his  plan  of  attack. 

Mr.  Sassoon's  verse  is  also  of  importance  because  it  paints 
life  in  the  trenches  with  a  realism  not  to  be  found  elsewhere 
in  the  English  poetry  of  the  war.  He  spares  us  nothing  of : 

The  strangled  horror 
And  butchered,  frantic  gestures  of  the  dead. 


GEORGIANS  203 


He  gives  us  every  detail  of  the  filth,  the  dullness,  and  the 
agony  of  the  trenches.  His  book  is  in  its  aim  destructive. 
It  is  a  great  pamphlet  against  war.  If  posterity  wishes  to 
know  what  war  was  like  during  this  period,  it  will  discover 
the  truth,  not  in  Barrack-room  Ballads,  but  in  Mr.  Sassoon's 
verse.  The  best  poems  in  the  book  are  poems  of  hatred. 
This  means  that  Mr.  Sassoon  has  still  other  worlds  to 
conquer  in  poetry.  His  poems  have  not  the  constructive 
ardour  that  we  find  in  the  revolutionary  poems  of  Shelley. 
They  are  utterances  of  pain  rather  than  of  vision.  Many  of 
them,  however,  rise  to  a  noble  pity — The  Prelude,  for 
instance,  and  Aftermath,  the  latter  of  which  ends: 

Do    you    remember    the    dark    months    you    held    the    sector    at 

Mametz, — 
The  night  you  watched  and  wired  and  dug  and  piled  sandbags  on 

parapets  ? 

Do  you  remember  the  rats ;  and  the  stench 
Of  corpses  rotting  in  front  of  the  front-line  trench, — 
And  dawn  coming,  dirty-white,  and  chill  with  a  hopeless  rain? 
Do  you  ever  stop  and  ask,  "  Is  it  all  going  to  happen  again?  " 

Do  you  remember  that  hour  of  din  before  the  attack — 

And  the  anger,  the  blind  compassion  that  seized  and  shook  you 

then 

As  you  peered  at  the  doomed  and  haggard  faces  of  your  men? 
Do  you  remember  the  stretcher-cases  lurching  back 
With  dying  eyes  and  lolling  heads, — those  ashen-grey 
Masks  of  the  lad  who  once  were  keen  and  kind  and  gay? 

Have  you  forgotten  yet?  .   .   . 

Look  up,  and  swear  by  the  green  of  the  Spring  that  you'll  never 
forget. 

Mr.  Sitwell's  satires — which  occupy  the  most  interesting 
pages  of  Argonaut  and  Juggernaut — seldom  take  us  into 
the  trenches.  Mr.  Sitwell  gets  all  the  subjects  he  wants  in 
London  clubs  and  drawing-rooms.  These  "  free-verse " 
satires  do  not  lend  themselves  readily  to  quotation,  but 
both  the  manner  and  the  mood  of  them  can  be  guessed  from 
the  closing  verses  of  War-horses,  in  which  the  "  septua- 
genarian butterflies  "  of  Society  return  to  their  platitudes 
and  parties  after  seeing  the  war  through : 


204  TEE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

But  now 

They  have  come  out. 

They  have  preened 

And  dried  themselves 

After  their  blood  bath. 

Old  men  seem  a  little  younger, 

And  tortoise-shell  combs 

Are  longer  than  ever; 

Earrings  weigh  down  aged  ears; 

And  Golconda  has  given  them  of  its  best. 

They  have  seen  it  through ! 

Theirs  is  the  triumph, 

And,  beneath 

The  carved  smile  of  the  Mona  Lisa, 

False  teeth 

Rattle 

Like  machine-guns, 

In  anticipation 

Of  food  and  platitudes. 

Les  Vieilles  Dames  Sans  Merci! 

Mr.  Sitwell's  hatred  of  war  is  seldom  touched  with  pity. 
It  is  arrogant  hatred.  There  is  little  emotion  in  it  but  that 
of  a  young  man  at  war  with  age.  He  pictures  the  dotards 
of  two  thousand  years  ago  complaining  that  Christ  did 

not  di^~  Like  a  hero 

With  an  oath  on  his  lips, 
Or  the  refrain  from  a  comic  song — 
Or  a  cheerful  comment  of  some  kind. 

His  own  verse,  however,  seems  to  me  to  be  hardly  more  in 
sympathy  with  the  spirit  of  Christ  than  with  the  spirit  of 
those  who  mocked  him.  He  is  moved  to  write  by  unbelief 
in  the  ideals  of  other  people  rather  than  by  the  passionate 
force  of  ideals  of  his  own.  He  is  a  sceptic,  not  a  sufferer. 
His  work  proceeds  less  from  his  heart  than  from  his  brain. 
It  is  a  clever  brain,  however,  and  his  satirical  poems  are 
harshly  entertaining  and  will  infuriate  the  right  people. 
They  may  not  kill  Goliath,  but  at  least  they  will  annoy 
Goliath's  friends.  David's  weapon,  it  should  be  remem- 
bered, was  a  sling,  with  some  pebbles  from  the  brook,  not 
a  pea-shooter. 


GEORGIANS  205 


The  truth  is,  so  far  as  I  can  see,  Mr.  Sitwell  has  not 
begun  to  take  poetry  quite  seriously.  His  non-satirical 
verse  is  full  of  bright  colour,  but  it  has  the  brightness,  not  of 
the  fields  and  the  flowers,  but  of  captive  birds  in  an  aviary. 
It  is  as  though  Mr.  Sitwell  had  taken  poetry  for  his  hobby. 
I  suspect  his  Argonauts  of  being  ballet  dancers.  He  enjoys 
amusing  little  decorations — phrases  such  as  "  concertina 
waves  "  and — 

The  ocean  at  a  toy  shore 

Yaps  like  a  Pekinese. 

His  moonlight  owl  is  surely  a  pretty  creature  from  the 
unreality  of  a  ballet : 

An  owl,  horned  wizard  of  the  night, 

Flaps  through  the  air  so  soft  and  still ; 

Moaning,  it  wings  its  flight 

Far  from  the  forest  cool, 

To  find  the  star-entangled  surface  of  a  pool, 

Where  it  may  drink  its  fill 

Of  stars. 

At  the  same  time,  here  and  there  are  evidences  that  Mr. 
Sitwell  has  felt  as  well  as  fancied.  The  opening  verse  of 
Pierrot  Old  gives  us  a  real  impression  of  shadows: 

The  harvest  moon  is  at  its  height, 
The  evening  primrose  greets  its  light 
With  grace  and  joy:  then  opens  up 
The  mimic  moon  within  its  cup. 
Tall  trees,  as  high  as  Babel  tower, 
Throw  down  their  shadows  to  the  flower — 
Shadows  that  shiver — seem  to  see 
An  ending  to  infinity. 

But  there  is  too  much  of  Pan,  the  fauns  and  all  those  other 
ballet-dancers  in  his  verse.  Mr.  Sitwell's  muse  wears  some 
pretty  costumes.  But  one  wonders  when  she  will  begin  to 
live  for  something  besides  clothes. 


XXL— LABOUR  OF  AUTHORSHIP 

LITERATURE  maintains  an  endless  quarrel  with  idle  sen- 
tences. Twenty  years  ago  this  would  have  seemed  too 
obvious  to  bear  saying.  But  in  the  meantime  there  has 
been  a  good  deal  of  dipping  of  pens  in  chaos,  and  authors 
have  found  excuses  for  themselves  in  a  theory  of  literature 
which  is  impatient  of  difficult  writing.  It  would  not  matter 
if  it  were  only  the  paunched  and  flat-footed  authors  who 
were  proclaiming  -the  importance  of  writing  without  style. 
Unhappily,  many  excellent  writers  as  well  have  used  their 
gift  of  style  to  publish  the  praise  of  stylelessness.  Within 
the  last  few  weeks  I  have  seen  it  suggested  by  two  different 
critics  that  the  hasty  writing  which  has  left  its  mark  on  so 
much  of  the  work  of  Scott  and  Balzac  was  a  good  thing  and 
almost  a  necessity  of  genius.  It  is  no  longer  taken  for 
granted,  as  it  was  in  the  days  of  Stevenson,  that  the  starry 
word  is  worth  the  pains  of  discovery.  Stevenson,  indeed, 
is  commonly  dismissed  as  a  pretty-pretty  writer,  a  word- 
taster  without  intellect  or  passion,  a  juggler  rather  than  an 
artist.  Pater's  bust  also  is  mutilated  by  irreverent  school- 
boys :  it  is  hinted  that  he  may  have  done  well  enough  for 
the  days  of  Victoria,  but  that  he  will  not  do  at  all  for  the 
world  of  George.  It  is  all  part  of  the  reaction  against  style 
which  took  place  when  everybody  found  out  the  aesthetes. 
It  was,  one  may  admit,  an  excellent  thing  to  get  rid  of  the 
aesthetes,  but  it  was  by  no  means  an  excellent  thing  to  get 
rid  of  the  virtue  which  they  tried  to  bring  into  English  art 
and  literature.  The  aesthetes  were  wrong  in  almost  every- 
thing they  said  about  art  and  literature,  but  they  were 
right  in  impressing  upon  the  children  of  men  the  duty  of 
good  drawing  and  good  words.  With  the  condemnation  of 
Oscar  Wilde,  however,  good  words  became  suspected  of 

206 


LABOUR  OF  AUTHOEtiHIP  207 

kinship  with  evil  deeds.  Style  was  looked  on  as  the  sign 
of  minor  poets  and  major  vices.  Possibly,  on  the  other 
hand,  the  reaction  against  style  had  nothing  to  do  with 
the  Wilde  condemnation.  The  heresy  of  the  stylelessness  is 
considerably  older  than  that.  Perhaps  it  is  not  quite  fair 
to  call  it  the  heresy  of  stylelessness:  it  would  be  more 
accurate  to  describe  it  as  the  heresy  of  style  without  pains. 
It  springs  from  the  idea  that  great  literature  is  all  a  matter 
of  first  fine  careless  raptures,  and  it  is  supported  by  the  fact 
that  apparently  much  of  the  greatest  literature  is  so.  If 
lines  like 

Hark,  hark  !  the  lark  at  Heaven's  gate  sings, 

or 

When  daffodils  begin  to  peer, 

or 

His  golden  locks  time  hath  to  silver  turned, 

shape  themselves  in  the  poet's  first  thoughts,  he  would  be 
a  manifest  fool  to  trouble  himself  further.  Genius  is  the 
recognition  of  the  perfect  line,  the  perfect  phrase,  the 
perfect  word,  when  it  appears,  and  this  perfect  line  or 
phrase  or  word  is  quite  as  likely  to  appear  in  the  twinkling 
of  an  eye  as  after  a  week  of  vigils.  But  the  point  is  that 
it  does  not  invariably  so  appear.  It  sometimes  cost 
Flaubert  three  days'  labour  to  write  one  perfect  sentence. 
Greater  writers  have  written  more  hurriedly.  But  this  does 
not  justify  lesser  writers  in  writing  hurriedly  too. 

Of  all  the  authors  who  have  exalted  the  part  played  in 
literature  by  inspiration  as  compared  with  labour,  none 
has  written  more  nobly  or  with  better  warrant  than  Shelley. 
"  The  mind,"  he  wrote  in  the  Defence  of 


The  mind  in  creation  is  as  a  fading  coal,  which  some  invisible 
influence,  like  an  inconstant  wind,  awakens  to  transitory  brightness  ; 
the  power  arises  from  within,  like  the  colour  of  a  flower  which  fades 
and  changes  as  it  is  developed,  and  the  conscious  portions  of  our 
natures  are  unprophetic  either  of  its  approach  or  its  departure.  Could 
this  influence  be  durable  in  its  original  purity  and  force,  it  is  impos- 
sible to  predict  the  greatness  of  the  results  ;  but  when  composition 
begins,  inspiration  is  already  on  the  decline,  and  the  most  glorious 


208  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

poetry  that  has  ever  been  communicated  to  the  world  is  probably  a 
feeble  shadow  of  the  original  conceptions  of  the  poet.  I  appeal  to  the 
greatest  poets  of  the  present  day,  whether  it  is  not  an  error  to  assert 
that  the  finest  passages  of  poetry  are  produced  by  labour  and  study. 

He  then  goes  on  to  interpret  literally  Milton's  reference  to 
Paradise  Lost  as  an  "  unpremeditated  song  "  "  dictated  " 
by  the  Muse,  and  to  reply  scornfully  to  those  "  who  would 
allege  the  fifty-six  various  readings  of  the  first  line  of  the 
Orlando  Furioso."  Who  is  there  who  would  not  agree 
with  Shelley  quickly  if  it  were  a  question  of  having  to 
choose  between  his  inspirational  theory  of  literature  and 
the  mechanical  theory  of  the  arts  advocated  by  writers  like 
Sir  Joshua  Reynolds?  Literature  without  inspiration  is 
obviously  even  a  meaner  thing  than  literature  without 
style.  But  the  idea  that  any  man  can  become  an  artist  by 
taking  pains  is  merely  an  exaggerated  protest  against  the 
idea  that  a  man  can  become  an  artist  without  taking  pains. 
Anthony  Trollope,  who  settled  down  industriously  to  his 
day's  task  of  literature  as  to  bookkeeping,  did  not  grow 
into  an  artist  in  any  large  sense;  and  Zola,  with  the  motto 
"  Nulle  dies  sine  linea  "  ever  facing  him  on  his  desk,  made 
himself  a  prodigious  author,  indeed,  but  never  more  than 
a  second-rate  writer.  On  the  other  hand,  Trollope  with- 
out industry  would  have  been  nobody  at  all,  and  Zola  with- 
out pains  might  as  well  have  been  a  waiter.  Nor  is  it  only 
the  little  or  the  clumsy  artists  who  have  found  inspiration 
in  labour.  It  is  a  pity  we  have  not  first  drafts  of  all  the 
great  poems  in  the  world :  we  might  then  see  how  much  of 
the  magic  of  literature  is  the  result  of  toil  and  how  much  of 
the  unprophesied  wind  of  inspiration.  Sir  Sidney  Colvin 
recently  published  an  early  draft  of  Keats's  sonnet,  "  Bright 
star,  would  I  were  stedfast  as  thou  art,"  which  showed 
that  in  the  case  of  Keats  at  least  the  mind  in  creation  was 
not  "  as  a  fading  coal,"  but  as  a  coal  blown  to  increasing 
flame  and  splendour  by  sheer  "  labour  and  study."  And 
the  poetry  of  Keats  is  full  of  examples  of  the  inspiration 
not  of  first  but  of  second  and  later  thoughts.  Henry 
Stephens,  a  medical  student  who  lived  with  him  for  some 


LABOUR  OF  AUTHORSHIP  209 

time,  declared  that  an  early  draft  of  Endymion  opened 
with  the  line: 

A  thing  of  beauty  is  a  constant  joy 

— a  line  which,  Stephens  observed  on  hearing  it,  was  "  a 
fine  line,  but  wanting  something."  Keats  thought  over 
it  for  a  little,  then  cried  out,  "  I  have  it,"  and  wrote  in  its 
place : 

A  thing  of  beauty  is  a  joy  for  ever. 

Nor  is  this  an  exceptional  example  of  the  studied  miracles 
of  Keats.  The  most  famous  and,  worn  and  cheapened  by 
quotation  though  it  is,  the  most  beautiful  of  all  his  phrases — 

magic  casements,  opening  on  the  foam 
Of  perilous  seas,  in  faery  lands  forlorn — 

did  not  reach  its  perfect  shape  without  hesitation  and 
thinking.  He  originally  wrote  "  the  wide  casements  "  and 
"  keelless  seas  " : 

the  wide  casements,  opening  on  the  foam 
Of  keelless  seas,  in  fairy  lands  forlorn. 

That  would  probably  have  seemed  beautiful  if  the  perfect 
version  had  not  spoiled  it  for  us.  But  does  not  the  final 
version  go  to  prove  that  Shelley's  assertion  that  "  when 
composition  begins,  inspiration  is  already  on  the  decline  " 
does  not  hold  good  for  all  poets?  On  the  contrary,  it  is 
often  the  heat  of  labour  which  produces  the  heat  of  inspira- 
tion. Or  rather  it  is  often  the  heat  of  labour  which  enables 
the  writer  to  recall  the  heat  of  inspiration.  Ben  Jonson, 
who  held  justly  that  "  the  poet  must  be  able  by  nature  and 
instinct  to  pour  out  the  treasure  of  his  mind,"  took  care  to 
add  the  warning  that  no  one  must  think  he  "  can  leap  forth 
suddenly  a  poet  by  dreaming  he  hath  been  in  Parnassus." 
Poe  has  uttered  a  comparable  warning  against  an  exces- 
sive belief  in  the  theory  of  the  plenary  inspiration  of  poets 
in  his  Marginalia,  where  he  declares  that  "  this  untenable 
and  paradoxical  idea  of  the  incompatibility  of  genius  and 
art"  must  be  "  kick[ed]  out  of  the  world's  way."  Words- 
worth's saying  that  poetry  has  its  origin  in  "  emotion 


210  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

recollected  in  tranquillity  "  also  suggests  that  the  inspira- 
tion of  poetry  is  an  inspiration  that  may  be  recaptured  by 
contemplation  and  labour.  How  eagerly  one  would  study 
a  Shakespeare  manuscript,  were  it  unearthed,  in  which  one 
could  see  the  shaping  imagination  of  the  poet  at  work  upon 
his  lines!  Many  people  have  the  theory — it  is  supported 
by  an  assertion  of  Jonson's — that  Shakespeare  wrote  with  a 
current  pen,  heedless  of  blots  and  little  changes.  He  was, 
it  is  evident,  not  one  of  the  correct  authors.  But  it  seems 
unlikely  that  no  pains  of  rewriting  went  to  the  making  of 
the  speeches  in  A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream  or  Hamlet's 
address  to  the  skull.  Shakespeare,  one  feels,  is  richer  than 
any  other  author  in  the  beauty  of  first  thoughts.  But  one 
seems  to  perceive  in  much  of  his  work  the  beauty  of  second 
thoughts  too.  There  have  been  few  great  writers  who  have 
been  so  incapable  of  revision  as  Robert  Browning,  but 
Browning  with  all  his  genius  is  not  a  great  stylist  to  be 
named  with  Shakespeare.  He  did  indeed  prove  himself 
to  be  a  great  stylist  in  more  than  one  poem,  such  as  Childe 
Roland — which  he  wrote  almost  at  a  sitting.  His  inspira- 
tion, however,  seldom  raised  his  work  to  the  same  beauty 
of  perfection.  He  is,  as  regards  mere  style,  the  most  im- 
perfect of  the  great  poets.  If  only  Tennyson  had  had  his 
genius!  If  only  Browning  had  had  Tennyson's  desire  for 
golden  words ! 

It  would  be  absurd,  however,  to  suggest  that  the  main 
labour  of  an  author  consists  in  rewriting.  The  choice  of 
words  may  have  been  made  before  a  single  one  of  them 
has  been  written  down,  as  tradition  tells  us  was  the  case 
with  Menander,  who  described  one  of  his  plays  as 
"  finished  "  before  he  had  written  a  word  of  it.  It  would 
be  foolish,  too,  to  write  as  though  perfection  of  form  in 
literature  were  merely  a  matter  of  picking  and  choosing 
among  decorative  words.  Style  is  a  method,  not  of  decora- 
tion, but  of  expression.  It  is  an  attempt  to  make  the 
beauty  and  energy  of  the  imagination  articulate.  It  is  not 
any  more  than  is  construction  the  essence  of  the  greatest 
art:  it  is,  however,  a  prerequisite  of  the  greatest  art.  Even 


LABOUR  OF  AUTHORSHIP  211 

those  writers  whom  we  regard  as  the  least  decorative  labour 
and  sorrow  after  it  no  less  than  the  aesthetes.  We  who  do 
not  know  Russian  do  not  usually  think  of  Tolstoy  as  'a 
stylist,  but  he  took  far  more  trouble  with  his  writing  than 
did  Oscar  Wilde  (whose  chief  fault  is,  indeed,  that  in  spite 
of  his  theories  his  style  is  not  laboured  and  artistic  but 
inspirational  and  indolent).  Count  Ilya  Tolstoy,  the  son 
of  the  novelist,  published  a  volume  of  reminiscences  of  his 
father  last  year,  in  which  he  gave  some  interesting  par- 
ticulars of  his  father's  energetic  struggle  for  perfection  in 
writing : 

When  Anna  Karenina  began  to  come  out  in  the  Russki  Vyestnik 
[he  wrote],  long  galley-proofs  were  posted  to  my  father,  and  he 
looked  them  through  and  corrected  them.  At  first,  the  margins 
would  be  marked  with  the  ordinary  typographical  signs,  letters 
omitted,  marks  of  punctuation,  and  so  on ;  then  individual  words 
would  be  changed,  and  then  whole  sentences ;  erasures  and  additions 
would  begin,  till  in  the  end  the  proof-sheet  would  be  reduced  to  a 
mass  of  patches,  quite  black  in  places,  and  it  was  quite  impossible 
to  send  it  back  as  it  stood  because  no  one  but  my  mother  could  make 
head  or  tail  of  the  tangle  of  conventional  signs,  transpositions,  and 
erasures. 

My  mother  would  sit  up  all  night  copying  the  whole  thing  out 
afresh. 

In  the  morning  there  lay  the  pages  on  her  table,  neatly  piled 
together,  covered  all  over  with  her  fine,  clear  handwriting,  and  every- 
thing ready,  so  that  when  "  Lyovotchka "  came  down  he  could  send 
the  proof-sheets  out  by  post. 

My  father  would  carry  them  off  to  his  study  to  have  "just  one  last 
look,"  and  by  the  evening  it  was  worse  than  before;  the  whole  thing 
had  been  rewritten  and  messed  up  once  more. 

"  Sonya,  my  dear,  I  am  very  sorry,  but  I've  spoilt  all  your  work 
again ;  I  promise  I  won't  do  it  any  more,"  he  would  say,  showing  her 
the  passages  with  a  guilty  air.  "We'll  send  them  off  to-morrow 
without  fail."  But  his  to-morrow  was  put  off  day  by  day  for  weeks 
or  months  together. 

"There's  just  one  bit  I  want  to  look  through  again,"  my  father 
would  say;  but  he  would  get  carried  away  and  rewrite  the  whole 
thing  afresh.  There  were  even  occasions  when,  after  posting  the 
proofs,  my  father  would  remember  some  particular  words  next  day 
and  correct  them  by  telegraph. 


212  TEE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

There,  better  than  in  a  thousand  generalizations,  you  see 
what  the  artistic  conscience  is.  In  a  world  in  which 
authors,  like  solicitors,  must  live,  it  is,  of  course,  seldom 
possible  to  take  pains  in  this  measure.  Dostoevsky  used 
to  groan  that  his  poverty  left  him  no  time  or  chance  to 
write  his  best  as  Tolstoy  and  Turgenev  could  write  theirs. 
But  he  at  least  laboured  all  that  he  could.  Novel-writing 
has  since  his  time  become  as  painless  as  dentistry,  and  the 
result  may  be  seen  in  a  host  of  books  that,  while  affecting 
to  be  fine  literature,  have  no  price  except  as  merchandise. 


XXII.— THE  THEORY  OF  POETRY 

MATTHEW  ARNOLD  once  advised  people  who  wanted  to 
know  what  was  good  poetry  not  to  trouble  themselves  with 
definitions  of  poetry,  but  to  learn  by  heart  passages,  or 
even  single  lines,  from  the  works  of  the  great  poets,  and 
to  apply  these  as  touchstones.  Certainly  a  book  like  Mr. 
Cowl's  Theory  of  Poetry  in  England,  which  aims  at  giving 
us  a  representative  selection  of  the  theoretical  things 
which  were  said  in  England  about  poetry  between  the  time 
of  Elizabeth  and  the  time  of  Victoria,  makes  one  wonder 
at  the  barrenness  of  men's  thoughts  about  so  fruitful  a 
world  as  that  of  the  poets.  Mr.  Cowl's  book  is  not 
intended  to  be  read  as  an  anthology  of  fine  things.  Its 
value  is  not  that  of  a  book  of  golden  thoughts.  It  is  an 
ordered  selection  of  documents  chosen,  not  for  their  beauty, 
but  simply  for  their  use  as  milestones  in  the  progress  of 
English'  poetic  theory.  It  is  a  work,  not  of  literature,  but 
of  literary  history;  and  students  of  literary  history  are 
under  a  deep  debt  of  gratitude  to  the  author  for  bringing 
together  and  arranging  the  documents  of  the  subject  in  so 
convenient  and  lucid  a  form.  The  arrangement  is  under 
subjects,  and  chronological.  There  are  forty-one  pages  on 
the  theory  of  poetic  creation,  beginning  with  George  Gas- 
coigne  and  ending  with  Matthew  Arnold.  These  are  fol- 
lowed by  a  few  pages  of  representative  passages  about 
poetry  as  an  imitative  art,  the  first  of  the  authors  quoted 
being  Roger  Ascham  and  the  last  F.  W.  H.  Myers.  The 
book  is  divided  into  twelve  sections  of  this  kind,  some  of 
which  have  a  tendency  to  overlap.  Thus,  in  addition  to 
the  section  on  poetry  as  an  imitative  art,  we  have  a  section 
on  imitation  of  nature,  another  on  external  nature,  and 
another  on  imitation.  Imitation,  in  the  last  of  these,  it  is 
true,  means  for  the  most  part  imitation  of  the  ancients,  as 

213 


214  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

in  the  sentence  in  which  Thomas  Rymer  urged  the  seven- 
teenth-century dramatists  to  imitate  Attic  tragedy  even  to 
the  point  of  introducing  the  chorus. 

Mr.  Cowl's  book  is  interesting,  however,  less  on  account 
of  the  sections  and  subsections  into  which  it  is  divided  than 
because  of  the  manner  in  which  it  enables  us  to  follow  the 
flight  of  English  poetry  from  the  romanticism  of  the  Eliza- 
bethans to  the  neo-classicism  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
and  from  this  on  to  the  romanticism  of  Wordsworth  and 
Coleridge,  and  from  this  to  a  newer  neo-classicism  whose 
prophet  was  Matthew  Arnold.  There  is  not  much  of 
poetry  captured  in  these  cold-blooded  criticisms,  but  still 
the  shadow  of  the  poetry  of  his  time  occasionally  falls  on 
the  critic's  formulae  and  aphorisms.  How  excellently  Sir 
Philip  Sidney  expresses  the  truth  that  the  poet  does  not 
imitate  the  world,  but  creates  a  world,  in  his  observation 
that  Nature's  world  "  is  brazen,  the  poets  only  deliver  a 
golden !  "  This,  however,  is  a  fine  saying  rather  than  an 
interpretation.  It  has  no  importance  as  a  contribution  to 
the  theory  of  poetry  to  compare  with  a  passage  like  that  so 
often  quoted  from  Wordsworth's  preface  to  Lyrical 
Ballads : 

I  have  said  that  poetry  is  the  spontaneous  overflow  of  powerful 
feelings ;  it  takes  its  origin  from  emotions  recollected  in  tranquillity ; 
the  emotion  is  contemplated  till,  by  a  species  of  reaction,  the  tran- 
quillity gradually  disappears,  and  an  emotion,  kindred  to  that  which 
was  before  the  subject  of  contemplation,  is  gradually  produced,  and 
does  itself  actually  exist  in  the  mind. 

As  a  theory  of  poetic  creation  this  may  not  apply  univer- 
sally. But  what  a  flood  of  light  it  throws  on  the  creative 
genius  of  Wordsworth  himself!  How  rich  in  psycho- 
logical insight  it  is,  for  instance,  compared  with  Dryden's 
comparable  reference  to  the  part  played  by  the  memory  in 
poetry : 

The  composition  of  all  poems  is,  or  ought  to  be,  of  wit;  and  wit 
in  the  poet  ...  is  no  other  than  the  faculty  of  imagination  in  the 
writer,  which,  like  a  nimble  spaniel,  beats  over  and  ranges  through 
the  field  of  memory,  till  it  springs  the  quarry  it  hunted  after. 


THE  THEORY  OF  POETRY  215 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  few  of  these  generalizations  carry 
one  far.  Ben  Jonson  revealed  more  of  the  secret  of  poetry 
when  he  said  simply :  "  It  utters  somewhat  above  a  mortal 
mouth."  So  did  Edgar  Allan  Poe,  when  he  said :  "  It  is 
no  mere  appreciation  of  the  beauty  before  us,  but  a  wild 
effort  to  reach  the  beauty  above."  Coleridge,  again,  initiates 
us  into  the  secrets  of  the  poetic  imagination  when  he  speaks 
of  it  as  something  which — 

combining  many  circumstances  into  one  moment  of  consciousness,  tends 
to  produce  that  ultimate  end  of  all  human  thought  and  human  feeling, 
unity,  and  thereby  the  reduction  of  the  spirit  to  its  principle  and 
fountain,  which  is  alone  truly  one. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  most  dreadful  thing  that  was  ever 
written  about  poetry  was  also  written  by  Coleridge,  and  is 
repeated  in  Mr.  Cowl's  book: 

How  excellently  the  German  Einbildungskraft  expresses  this  prime 
and  loftiest  faculty,  the  power  of  coadunation,  the  faculty  that  forms 
the  many  into  one — Ineins-bi Idung !  Eisenoplasy,  or  esenoplastic 
power,  is  contradistinguished  from  fantasy,  either  catoptric  or 
metoptric — repeating  simply,  or  by  transposition — and,  again,  involun- 
tary [fantasy]  as  in  dreams,  or  by  an  act  of  the  will. 

The  meaning  is  simple  enough :  it  is  much  the  same  as  that 
of  the  preceding  paragraph.  But  was  there  ever  a  passage 
written  suggesting  more  forcibly  how  much  easier  it  is  to 
explain  poetry  by  writing  it  than  by  writing  about  it? 

Mr.  Cowl's  book  makes  it  clear  that  fiercely  as  the  critics 
may  dispute  about  poetry,  they  are  practically  all  agreed 
on  at  least  one  point — that  it  is  an  imitation.  The  schools 
have  differed  less  over  the  question  whether  it  is  an  imita- 
tion than  over  the  question  how,  in  a  discussion  on  the 
nature  of  poetry,  the  word  "  imitation  "  must  be  qualified. 
Obviously,  the  poet  must  imitate  something — either 
what  he  sees  in  nature,  or  what  he  sees  in  memory, 
or  what  he  sees  in  other  poets,  or  what  he  sees 
in  his  soul,  or  it  may  me,  all  together.  There  arise 
schools  every  now  and  then — classicists,  Parnassians, 
realists,  and  so  forth — who  believe  in  imitation,  but  will 


216  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

not  allow  it  to  be  a  free  imitation  of  things  seen  in  the 
imaginative  world.  In  the  result  their  work  is  no  true 
imitation  of  life.  Pope's  poetry  is  not  as  true  an  imitation 
of  life  as  Shakespeare's.  Nor  is  Zola's,  for  all  its  fidelity, 
as  close  an  imitation  of  life  as  Victor  Hugo's.  Poetry,  or 
prose  either,  without  romance,  without  liberation,  can 
never  rise  above  the  second  order.  The  poet  must  be 
faithful  not  only  to  his  subject,  but  to  his  soul.  Poe 
defined  art  as  the  *'  reproduction  of  what  the  senses  per- 
ceive in  nature  through  the  veil  of  the  soul,"  and  this, 
though  like  most  definitions  of  art,  incomplete,  is  true  in 
so  far  as  it  reminds  us  that  art  at  its  greatest  is  the  state- 
ment of  a  personal  and  ideal  vision.  That  is  why  the 
reverence  of  rules  in  the  arts  is  so  dangerous.  It  puts  the 
standards  of  poetry  not  in  the  hands  of  the  poet,  but  in 
the  hands  of  the  grammarians.  It  is  a  Procrustes'  bed 
which  mutilates  the  poet's  vision.  Luckily,  England  has 
always  been  a  rather  lawless  country,  and  we  find  even 
Pope  insisting  that  "  to  judge  ...  of  Shakespeare  by 
Aristotle's  rules  is  like  trying  a  man  by  the  laws  of  one 
country  who  acted  under  those  of  another."  Dennis 
might  cry :  "  Poetry  is  either  an  art  or  whimsy  and 
fanaticism.  .  .  .  The  great  design  of  the  arts  is  to  restore 
the  decays  that  happened  to  human  nature  by  the  fall,  by 
restoring  order."  But,  on  the  whole,  the  English  poets 
and  critics  have  realized  the  truth  that  it  is  not  an  order 
imposed  from  without,  but  an  order  imposed  from  within 
at  which  the  poet  must  aim.  He  aims  at  bringing  order 
into  chaos,  but  that  does  not  mean  that  he  aims  at  bringing 
A'ristotle  into  chaos.  He  is,  in  a  sense,  "  beyond  good 
and  evil,"  so  far  as  the  orthodoxies  of  form  are  concerned. 
Coleridge  put  the  matter  in  a  nutshell  when  he  remarked 
that  the  mistake  of  the  formal  critics  who  condemned 
Shakespeare  as  "  a  sort  of  African  nature,  rich  in  beau- 
tiful monsters,"  lay  "  in  the  confounding  mechanical  regu- 
larity with  organic  form."  And  he  states  the  whole  duty 
of  poets  as  regards  form  in  another  sentence  in  the  same 
lecture : 


THE  THEORY  OF  POETRY  217 

As  it  must  not,  so  genius  cannot,  be  lawless;  for  it  is  even  this 
that  constitutes  its  genius — the  power  of  acting  creatively  under  laws 
of  its  own  origination. 

Mr.  Cowl  enables  us  to  follow,  as  in  no  other  book  we 
know,  the  endless  quarrel  between  romance  and  the  rules, 
between  the  spirit  and  the  letter,  among  the  English 
authorities  on  poetry.  It  is  a  quarrel  which  will  obviously 
never  be  finally  settled  in  any  country.  The  mechanical 
theory  is  a  necessary  reaction  against  romance  that  has 
decayed  into  windiness,  extravagance,  and  incoherence.  It 
brings  the  poets  back  to  literature  again.  The  romantic 
theory,  on  the  other  hand,  is  necessary  as  a  reminder  that 
the  poet  must  offer  to  the  world,  not  a  formula,  but  a  vision. 
It  brings  the  poets  back  to  nature  again.  No  one  but  a 
Dennis  will  hesitate  an  instant  in  deciding  which  of  the 
theories  is  the  more  importantly  and  eternally  true  one. 


XXIII.— THE  CRITIC  AS  DESTROYER 

IT  has  been  said  often  enough  that  all  good  criticism  is 
praise.  Pater  boldly  called  one  of  his  volumes  of  critical 
essays  Appreciations.  There  are,  of  course,  not  a  few 
brilliant  instances  of  hostility  in  criticism.  The  best-known 
of  these  in  English  is  Macaulay's  essay  on  Robert  Mont- 
gomery. In  recent  years  we  have  witnessed  the  much  more 
significant  assault  by  Tolstoy  upon  almost  the  whole  army 
of  the  authors  of  the  civilized  world  from  ^Eschylus  down 
to  Mallarme.  What  is  Art?  was  unquestionably  the  most 
remarkable  piece  of  sustained  hostile  criticism  that  was  ever 
written.  At  the  same  time,  it  was  less  a  denunciation  of 
individual  authors  than  an  attack  on  the  general  tendencies 
of  the  literary  art.  Tolstoy  quarrelled  with  Shakespeare  not 
so  much  for  being  Shakespeare  as  for  failing  to  write  like 
the  authors  of  the  Gospels.  Tolstoy  would  have  made  every 
book  a  Bible.  He  raged  against  men  of  letters  because  with 
them  literature  was  a  means  not  to  more  abundant  life  but  to 
more  abundant  luxury.  Like  so  many  inexorable  moralists, 
he  was  intolerant  of  all  literature  that  did  not  serve  as  a  sort 
of  example  of  his  own  moral  and  social  theories.  That  is 
why  he  was  not  a  great  critic,  though  he  was  immeasurably 
greater  than  a  great  critic.  One  would  not  turn  to  him 
for  the  perfect  appreciation  even  of  one  of  the  authors  he 
spared,  like  Hugo  or  Dickens.  The  good  critic  must  in 
some  way  begin  by  accepting  literature  as  it  is,  just  as  the 
good  lyric  poet  must  begin  by  accepting  life  as  it  is.  He 
may  be  as  full  of  revolutionary  and  reforming  theories  as  he 
likes,  but  he  must  not  allow  any  of  these  to  come  like  a 
cloud  between  him  and  the  sun,  moon  and  stars  of  literature. 
The  man  who  disparages  the  beauty  of  flowers  and  birds 
and  love  and  laughter  and  courage  will  never  be  counted 

218 


THE  CRITIC  AS  DESTROYER  219 

among  the  lyric  poets;  and  the  man  who  questions  the 
beauty  of  the  inhabited  world  the  imaginative  writers  have 
made — a  world  as  unreasonable  in  its  loveliness  as  the 
world  of  nature — is  not  in  the  way  of  becoming  a  critic  of 
literature. 

Another  argument  which  tells  in  favour  of  the  theory 
that  the  best  criticism  is  praise  is  the  fact  that  almost  all 
the  memorable  examples  of  critical  folly  have  been  denun- 
ciations. One  remembers  that  Carlyle  dismissed  Herbert 
Spencer  as  a  "  never-ending  ass."  One  remembers  that 
Byron  thought  nothing  of  Keats — "  Jack  Ketch,"  as  he 
called  him.  One  remembers  that  the  critics  damned 
Wagner's  operas  as  a  new  form  of  sin.  One  remembers 
that  Ruskin  denounced  one  of  Whistler's  nocturnes  as  a 
pot  of  paint  flung  in  the  face  of  the  British  public.  In  the 
world  of  science  we  have  a  thousand  similar  examples 
of  new  genius  being  hailed  by  the  critics  as  folly  and 
charlatanry.  Only  the  other  day  a  biographer  of  Lord 
Lister  was  reminding  us  how,  at  the  British  Association  in 
1869,  Lister's  antiseptic  treatment  was  attacked  as  a  "  return 
to  the  dark  ages  of  surgery,"  the  "  carbolic  mania,"  and  "  a 
professional  criminality."  The  history  of  science,  art, 
music  and  literature  is  strewn  with  the  wrecks  of  such  hostile 
criticisms.  It  is  an  appalling  spectacle  for  anyone  interested 
in  asserting  the  intelligence  of  the  human  race.  So  appal- 
ling is  it,  indeed,  that  most  of  us  nowadays  labour  under 
such  a  terror  of  accidentally  condemning  something  good 
that  we  have  not  the  courage  to  condemn  anything  at  all. 
We  think  of  the  way  in  which  Browning  was  once  taunted 
for  his  obscurity,  and  we  cannot  find  it  in  our  hearts  to 
censure  Mr.  Doughty.  We  recall  the  ignorant  attacks  on 
Manet  and  Monet,  and  we  will  not  risk  an  onslaught  on 
the  follies  of  Picasso  and  the  worse-than-Picassos  of  con- 
temporary art.  We  grow  a  monstrous  and  unhealthy  plant 
of  tolerance  in  our  souls,  and  its  branches  drop  colourless 
good  words  on  the  just  and  on  the  unjust — on  everybody, 
indeed,  except  Miss  Marie  Corelli,  Mr.  Hall  Caine,  and  a 
few  others  whom  we  know  to  be  second-rate  because  they 


220  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

have  such  big  circulations.  This  is  really  a  disastrous  state 
of  affairs  for  literature  and  the  other  arts.  If  criticism  is, 
generally  speaking,  praise,  it  is,  more  definitely,  praise  of 
the  right  things.  Praise  for  the  sake  of  praise  is  as  great  an 
evil  as  blame  for  the  sake  of  blame.  Indiscriminate  praise, 
in  so  far  as  it  is  the  result  of  distrust  of  one's  own  judgment 
or  of  laziness  or  of  insincerity,  is  one  of  the  deadly  sins  in 
criticism.  It  is  also  one  of  the  deadly  dull  sins.  Its  effect 
is  to  make  criticism  ever  more  unreadable,  and  in  the  end 
even  the  publishers,  who  love  silly  sentences  to  quote  about 
their  bad  books,  will  open  their  eyes  to  the  futility  of  it. 
They  will  realize  that,  when  once  criticism  has  become 
unreal  and  unreadable,  people  will  no  more  be  bothered 
with  it  than  they  will  with  drinking  lukewarm  water.  I 
mention  the  publisher  in  especial,  because  there  is  no  doubt 
that  it  is  with  the  idea  of  putting  the  publishers  in  a  good, 
open-handed  humour  that  so  many  papers  and  reviews  have 
turned  criticism  into  a  kind  of  stagnant  pond.  Publishers, 
fortunately,  are  coming  more  and  more  to  see  that  this  kind 
of  criticism  is  of  no  use  to  them.  Reviews  in  such-and-such 
a  paper,  they  will  tell  you,  do  not  sell  books.  And  the 
papers  to  which  they  refer  in  such  cases  are  always  papers 
in  which  praise  is  disgustingly  served  out  to  everybody, 
like  spoonfuls  of  treacle-and-brim stone  to  a  mob  of  school- 
children. 

Criticism,  then,  is  praise,  but  it  is  praise  of  literature. 
There  is  all  the  difference  in  the  world  between  that  and  the 
praise  of  what  pretends  to  be  literature.  True  criticism  is  a 
search  for  beauty  and  truth  and  an  announcement  of  them. 
It  does  not  care  twopence  whether  the  method  of  their 
revelation  is  new  or  old,  academic  or  futuristic.  It  only  asks 
that  the  revelation  shall  be  genuine.  It  is  concerned  with 
form,  because  beauty  and  truth  demand  perfect  expression. 
But  it  is  a  mere  heresy  in  aesthetics  to  say  that  perfect 
expression  is  the  whole  of  art  that  matters.  It  is  the  spirit 
that  breaks  through  the  form  that  is  the  main  interest  of 
criticism.  Form,  we  know,  has  a  permanence  of  its  own: 
so  much  so  that  it  has  again  and  again  been  worshipped  by 


TEE  CRITIC  AS  DESTROYER  221 

the  idolaters  of  art  as  being  in  itself  more  enduring  than 
the  thing  which  it  embodies.  Robert  Burns,  by  his  genius 
for  perfect  statement,  can  give  immortality  to  the  joys  of 
being  drunk  with  whiskey  as  the  average  hymn-writer 
cannot  give  immortality  to  the  joys  of  being  drunk  with 
the  love  of  God.  Style,  then,  does  seem  actually  to  be  a 
form  of  life.  The  critic  may  not  ignore  it  any  more  than 
he  may  exaggerate  its  place  in  the  arts.  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  he  could  not  ignore  it  if  he  would,  for  style  and  spirit 
have  a  way  of  corresponding  to  one  another  like  health  and 
sunlight. 

It  is  to  combat  the  stylelessness  of  many  contemporary 
writers  that  the  destructive  kind  of  criticism  is  just  now  most 
necessary.  For,  dangerous  as  the  heresy  of  style  was  forty 
or  fifty  years  ago,  the  newer  heresy  of  sylelessness  is  more 
dangerous  still.  It  has  become  the  custom  even  of  men 
who  write  well  to  be  as  ashamed  of  their  style  as  a  school- 
boy is  of  being  caught  in  an  obvious  piece  of  goodness. 
They  keep  silent  about  it  as  though  it  were  a  kind  of  pow- 
dering or  painting.  They  do  not  realize  that  it  is  merely  a 
form  of  ordinary  truthfulness — the  truthfulness  of  the 
word  about  the  thought.  They  forget  that  one  has  no  more 
right  to  misuse  words  than  to  beat  one's  wife.  Someone  has 
said  that  in  the  last  analysis  style  is  a  moral  quality.  It 
is  a  sincerity,  a  refusal  to  bow  the  knee  to  the  superficial,  a 
passion  for  justice  in  language.  Stylelessness,  where  it  is 
not,  like  colour-blindness,  an  accident  of  nature,  is  for  the 
most  part  merely  an  echo  of  the  commercial  man's  world  of 
hustle.  It  is  like  the  rushing  to  and  fro  of  motor-buses 
which  save  minutes  with  great  loss  of  life.  It  is  like  the 
swift  making  of  furniture  with  unseasoned  wood.  It  is  a 
kind  of  introduction  of  the  quick-lunch  system  into  litera- 
ture. One  cannot  altogether  acquit  Mr.  Masefield  of  a  hasty 
stylelessness  in  some  of  those  long  poems  which  the  world 
has  been  raving  about  in  the  last  year  or  two.  His  line 
in  The  Everlasting  Mercy : 

And  yet  men  ask,  "Are  barmaids  chaste?" 


222  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

is  a  masterpiece  of  inexpertness.    And  the  couplet: 

The  Bosun  turned :  "  I'll  give  you  a  thick  ear ! 
Do  it  ?    I  didn't.    Get  to  hell  from  here !  " 

is  like  a  Sunday-school  teacher's  lame  attempt  to  repeat  a 
blasphemous  story.  Mr.  Masefield,  on  the  other  hand,  is, 
we  always  feel,  wrestling  with  language.  If  he  writes  in  a 
hurry,  it  is  not  because  he  is  indifferent,  but  because  his 
soul  is  full  of  something  that  he  is  eager  to  express.  He 
does  not  gabble ;  he  is,  as  it  were,  a  man  stammering  out  a 
vision.  So  vastly  greater  are  his  virtues  than  his  faults  as 
a  poet,  indeed,  that  the  latter  would  only  be  worth  the 
briefest  mention  if  it  were  not  for  the  danger  of  their 
infecting  other  writers  who  envy  him  his  method  but  do  not 
possess  his  conscience.  One  cannot  contemplate  with 
equanimity  the  prospect  of  a  Masefield  school  of  poetry  with 
all  Mr.  Masefield's  ineptitudes  and  none  of  his  genius. 

Criticism,  however,  it  is  to  be  feared,  is  a  fight  for  a  lost 
cause  if  it  essays  to  prevent  the  founding  of  schools  upon 
the  faults  of  good  writers.  Criticism  will  never  kill  the 
copyist.  Nothing  but  the  end  of  the  world  can  do  that. 
Still,  whatever  the  practical  results  of  his  work  may  be,  it 
is  the  function  of  the  critic  to  keep  the  standard  of  writing 
high — to  insist  that  the  authors  shall  write  well,  even  if  his 
own  sentences  are  like  torn  strips  of  newspaper  for  common- 
ness. He  is  the  enemy  of  sloppiness  in  others — especially 
of  that  airy  sloppiness  which  so  often  nowadays  runs  to 
four  or  five  hundred  pages  in  a  novel.  It  was  amazing  to 
find  with  what  airiness  a  promising  writer  like  Mr.  Comp- 
ton  Mackenzie  gave  us  some  years  ago  Sinister  Street,  a 
novel  containing  thousands  of  sentences  that  only  seemed  to 
be  there  because  he  had  not  thought  it  worth  his  while  to 
leave  them  out,  and  thousands  of  others  that  seemed  to  be 
mere  hurried  attempts  to  express  realities  upon  which  he  was 
unable  to  spend  more  time.  Here  is  a  writer  who  began 
literature  with  a  sense  of  words,  and  who  is  declining  into 
a  mere  sense  of  wordiness.  It  is  simply  another  instance  of 
the  ridiculous  rush  of  writing  that  is  going  on  all  about  us — 


THE  CRITIC  Ati  DESTROYER  223 

a  rush  to  satisfy  a  public  which  demands  quantity  rather 
than  quality  in  its  books.  I  do  not  say  that  Mr.  Mackenzie 
consciously  wrote  down  to  the  public,  but  the  atmosphere 
obviously  affected  him.  Otherwise  he  would  hardly  have 
let  his  book  go  out  into  the  world  till  he  had  rewritten  it — 
till  he  had  separated  his  necessary  from  his  unnecessary 
sentences  and  given  his  conversations  the  tones  of  reality. 
There  is  no  need,  however,  for  criticism  to  lash  out  indis- 
criminately at  all  hurried  writing.  There  are  a  multitude 
of  books  turned  out  every  year  which  make  no  claim  to  be 
literature — the  "  thrillers,"  for  example,  of  Mr.  Phillips 
Oppenheim  and  of  that  capable  firm  of  feuilletonists, 
Coralie  Stanton  and  Heath  Hosken.  I  do  not  think  litera- 
ture stands  to  gain  anything,  even  though  all  the  critics  in 
Europe  were  suddenly  to  assail  this  kind  of  writing.  It  is 
a  frankly  commercial  affair,  and  we  have  no  more  right  to 
demand  style  from  those  who  live  by  it  than  from  the 
authors  of  the  weather  reports  in  the  newspapers. 
Often,  one  notices,  when  the  golden  youth,  fresh  from 
college  and  the  reading  of  Shelley  and  Anatole  France, 
commences  literary  critic,  he  begins  damning  the  sensa- 
tional novelists  as  though  it  were  their  business  to  write 
like  Jane  Austen.  This  is  a  mere  waste  of  literary 
standards,  which  need  only  be  applied  to  what  pretends  to 
be  literature.  That  is  why  one  is  often  impelled  to  attack 
really  excellent  writers,  like  Sir  Arthur  Quiller-Couch  or 
Mr.  Galsworthy,  as  one  would  never  dream  of  attacking, 
say,  Mr.  William  Le  Queux.  To  attack  Sir  Arthur  Quiller- 
Couch  is,  indeed,  a  form  of  appreciation,  for  the  only  just 
criticism  that  can  be  levelled  against  him  is  that  his  later 
work  does  not  seem  to  be  written  with  that  singleness  of 
imagination  and  that  deliberate  Tightness  of  phrase  which 
made  Noughts  and  Crosses  and  The  Ship  of  Stars  books 
to  be  kept  beyond  the  end  of  the  year.  If  one  attacks  Mr. 
Galsworthy,  again,  it  is  usually  because  one  admires  his 
best  work  so  whole-heartedly  that  one  is  not  willing  to  accept 
from  him  anything  but  the  best.  One  cannot,  however,  be 
content  to  see  the  author  of  The  Man  of  Property  dropping 


224  TEE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

the  platitudes  and  the  false  fanci  fulness  of  The  Inn  of 
Tranquillity.  It  is  the  false  pretences  in  literature  which 
criticism  must  seek  to  destroy.  Recognizing  Mr.  Gals- 
worthy's genius  for  the  realistic  representation  of  men  and 
women,  it  must  not  be  blinded  by  that  genius  to  the 
essential  second-rateness  and  sentimentality  of  much  of  his 
presentation  of  ideas.  He  is  a  man  of  genius  in  the  black 
humility  with  which  he  confesses  strength  and  weakness 
through  the  figures  of  men  and  women.  He  achieves  too 
much  of  a  pulpit  complacency — therefore  of  condescending- 
ness — therefore  of  falseness  to  the  deep  intimacy  of  good 
literature — when  he  begins  to  moralize  about  time  and  the 
universe.  One  finds  the  same  complacency,  the  same  con- 
descendingness,  in  a  far  higher  degree  in  the  essays  of 
Mr.  A.  C.  Benson.  Mr.  Benson,  I  imagine,  began  writing 
with  a  considerable  literary  gift,  but  his  later  work  seems 
to  me  to  have  little  in  it  but  a  good  man's  pretentiousness. 
It  has  the  air  of  going  profoundly  into  the  secrecies  of  love 
and  joy  and  truth,  but  it  contains  hardly  a  sentence  that 
would  waken  a  ruffle  on  the  surface  of  the  shallowest  spirit. 
It  is  not  of  the  literature  that  awakens,  indeed,  but  of  the 
literature  that  puts  to  sleep,  and  that  is  always  a  danger 
unless  it  is  properly  labelled  and  recognizable.  Sleeping- 
draughts  may  be  useful  to  help  a  sick  man  through  a  bad 
night,  but  one  does  not  recommend  them  as  a  cure  for 
ordinary  healthy  thirst.  Nor  will  Mr.  Benson  escape  just 
criticism  on  the  score  of  his  manner  of  writing.  He  is  an 
absolute  master  of  the  otiose  word,  the  superfluous  sen- 
tence. He  pours  out  pages  as  easily  as  a  bird  sings,  but, 
alas!  it  is  a  clockwork  bird  in  this  instance.  He  lacks  the 
true  innocent  absorption  in  his  task  which  makes  happy 
writing  and  happy  reading. 

It  is  not  always  the  authors,  on  the  other  hand,  whose 
pretences  it  is  the  work  of  criticism  to  destroy.  It  is 
frequently  the  wild  claims  of  the  partisans  of  an  author  that 
must  be  put  to  the  test.  This  sort  of  pretentiousness  often 
happens  during  "  booms,"  when  some  author  is  talked  of 
as  though  he  were  the  only  man  who  had  ever  written  well. 


THE  CRITIC  A3  DESTROYER  225 

How  many  of  these  booms  have  we  had  in  recent  years — 
booms  of  Wilde,  of  Synge,  of  Donne,  of  Dostoevsky!  On 
the  whole,  no  doubt,  they  do  more  good  than  harm.  They 
create  a  vivid  enthusiasm  for  literature  that  affects  many 
people  who  might  not  otherwise  know  that  to  read  a  fine 
book  is  as  exciting  an  experience  as  going  to  a  horse-race. 
Hundreds  of  people  would  not  have  the  courage  to  sit  down 
to  read  a  book  like  The  Brothers  Karamazov  unless  they 
were  compelled  to  do  so  as  a  matter  of  fashionable  duty. 
On  the  other  hand,  booms  more  than  anything  else  make  for 
false  estimates.  It  seems  impossible  with  many  people  to 
praise  Dostoevsky  without  saying  that  he  is  greater  than 
Tolstoy  or  Turgenev.  Oscar  Wilde  enthusiasts,  again,  invite 
us  to  rejoice,  not  only  over  that  pearl  of  triviality,  The  Im- 
portance of  Being  Earnest,  but  over  a  blaze  of  paste  jewelry 
like  Salome.  Similarly,  Donne  worshippers  are  not  content 
to  ask  us  to  praise  Donne's  gifts  of  fancy,  analysis  and  idio- 
syncratic music.  They  insist  that  we  shall  also  admit  that 
he  knew  the  human  heart  better  than  Shakespeare.  It  may 
be  all  we  like  sheep  have  gone  astray  in  this  kind  of  literary 
riot.  And  so  long  as  the  exaggeration  of  a  good  writer's 
genius  is  an  honest  personal  affair,  one  resents  it  no  more 
than  one  resents  the  large  nose  or  the  bandy  legs  of  a  friend. 
It  is  when  men  begin  to  exaggerate  in  herds — to  repeat  like 
a  lesson  learned  the  enthusiasm  of  others — that  the  boom  be- 
comes offensive.  It  is  as  if  men  who  had  not  large  noses 
were  to  begin  to  pretend  that  they  had,  or  as  if  men  whose 
legs  were  not  bandy  were  to  pretend  that  they  were,  for 
fashion's  sake.  Insincerity  is  the  one  entirely  hideous  artis- 
tic sin — whether  in  the  creation  or  in  the  appreciation  of 
art.  The  man  who  enjoys  reading  The  Family  Herald, 
and  admits  it,  is  nearer  a  true  artistic  sense  than  the  man 
who  is  bored  by  Henry  James  and  denies  it ;  though,  per- 
haps, hypocrisy  is  a  kind  of  homage  paid  to  art  as  well  as 
to  virtue.  Still,  the  affectation  of  literary  rapture  offends 
like  every  other  affectation.  It  was  the  chorus  of  imitative 
rapture  over  Synge  a  few  years  ago  that  helped  most  to 
bring  about  a  speedy  reaction  against  him.  Synge  was  un- 


226  TEE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

doubtedly  a  man  of  fine  genius — the  genius  of  gloomy  com- 
edy and  ironic  tragedy.  His  mind  delved  for  strangenesses 
in  speech  and  imagination  among  people  whom  the  new  age 
had  hardly  touched,  and  his  discoveries  were  sufficiently 
magnificent  to  make  the  eyes  of  any  lover  of  language 
brighten.  His  work  showed  less  of  the  mastery  of  life, 
however,  than  of  the  mastery  of  a  theme.  It  was  a  curious 
by-world  of  literature,  a  little  literature  of  death's-heads, 
and,  therefore,  no  more  to  be  mentioned  with  the  work  of 
the  greatest  than  the  stories  of  Villiers  de  1'Isle-Adam. 
Unfortunately,  some  disturbances  in  Dublin  at  the  first  pro- 
duction of  The  Playboy  turned  the  play  into  a  battle-cry, 
and  the  artists,  headed  by  Mr.  Yeats,  used  Synge  to  belabour 
the  Philistinism  of  the  mob.  In  the  excitement  of  the  fight 
they  were  soon  talking  about  Synge  as  though  Dublin  had 
rejected  a  Shakespeare.  Mr.  Yeats  even  used  the  word 
"  Homeric  "  about  him — surely  the  most  inappropriate  word 
it  would  be  possible  to  imagine.  Before  long  Mr.  Yeats's 
enthusiasm  had  spread  to  England,  where  people  who  ig- 
nored the  real  magic  of  Synge's  work,  as  it  is  to  be  found 
in  Riders  to  the  Sea,  In  the  Shadow  of  the  Glen,  and  The 
Well  of  the  Saints,  went  into  ecstasies  over  the  inferior 
Playboy.  Such  a  boom  meant  not  the  appreciation  of  Synge 
but  a  glorification  of  his  more  negligible  work.  It  was  al- 
most as  if  we  were  to  boom  Swinburne  on  the  score  of  his 
later  political  poetry.  Criticism  makes  for  the  destruction 
of  such  booms.  I  do  not  mean  that  the  critic  has  not  the 
right  to  fling  about  superlatives  like  any  other  man.  Criti- 
cism, in  one  aspect,  is  the  art  of  flinging  about  superlatives 
finely.  But  they  must  be  personal  superlatives,  not  boom 
superlatives.  Even  when  they  are  showered  on  an  author 
who  is  the  just  victim  of  a  boom — and,  on  a  reasonable  esti- 
mate, at  least  fifty  per  cent,  of  the  booms  have  some  justi- 
fication— they  are  as  unbeautiful  as  rotten  apples  unless  they 
have  this  personal  kind  of  honesty. 

It  may  be  thought  that  an  attitude  of  criticism  like  this 
may  easily  sink  into  Pharisaism — a  sort  of  "  superior- 
person  "  aloofness  from  other  people.  And  no  doubt  the 


THE  CRITIC  AS  DESTROYER  227 

critic,  like  other  people,  needs  to  beat  his  breast  and  pray, 
"  God  be  merciful  to  me,  a — critic."  On  the  whole,  how- 
ever, the  critic  is  far  less  of  a  professional  faultfinder  than 
is  sometimes  imagined.  He  is  first  of  all  a  virtue-finder,  a 
singer  of  praise.  He  is  not  concerned  with  getting  rid  of  the 
dross  except  in  so  far  as  it  hides  the  gold.  In  other  words, 
the  destructive  side  of  criticism  is  purely  a  subsidiary  affair. 
None  of  the  best  critics  have  been  men  of  destructive  minds. 
They  are  like  gardeners  whose  business  is  more  with  the 
flowers  than  with  the  weeds.  If  I  may  change  the  metaphor, 
the  whole  truth  about  criticism  is  contained  in  the  Eastern 
proverb  which  declares  that  "  Love  is  the  net  of  Truth." 
It  is  as  a  lover  that  the  critic,  like  the  lyric  poet  and  the 
mystic,  will  be  most  excellently  symbolized. 


XXIV.— BOOK  REVIEWING 

I  NOTICE  that  in  Mr.  Seekers'  Art  and  Craft  of  Letters  series 
no  volume  on  book-reviewing  has  yet  been  announced.  A 
volume  on  criticism  has  been  published,  it  is  true,  but  book- 
reviewing  is  something  different  from  criticism.  It  swings 
somewhere  between  criticism  on  the  one  hand  and  reporting 
on  the  other.  When  Mr.  Arthur  Bourchier  a  few  years 
ago,  in  the  course  of  a  dispute  about  Mr.  Walkley's  criti- 
cisms, spoke  of  the  dramatic  critic  as  a  dramatic  reporter, 
he  did  a  very  insolent  thing.  But  there  was  a  certain  rea- 
sonableness in  his  phrase.  The  critic  on  the  Press  is  a  news- 
gatherer  as  surely  as  the  man  who  is  sent  to  describe  a  public 
meeting  or  a  strike.  Whether  he  is  asked  to  write  a  report 
on  a  play  of  Mr.  Shaw's  or  an  exhibition  of  etchings  by 
Mr.  Bone  or  a  volume  of  short  stories  by  Mr.  Conrad  or  a 
speech  by  Mr.  Asquith  or  a  strike  on  the  Clyde,  his  function 
is  the  same.  It  is  primarily  to  give  an  account,  a  description, 
of  what  he  has  seen  or  heard  or  read.  This  may  seem  to 
many  people — especially  to  critics — a  degrading  conception 
of  a  book-reviewer's  work.  But  it  is  quite  the  contrary. 
A  great  deal  of  book-reviewing  at  the  present  time  is  dead 
matter.  Book-reviews  ought  at  least  to  be  alive  as  news. 
At  present  everybody  is  ready  to  write  book-reviews.  This 
is  because  nearly  everybody  believes  that  they  are  the  easiest 
kind  of  thing  to  write.  People  who  would  shrink  from 
offering  to  write  poems  or  leading  articles  or  descriptive 
sketches  of  football  matches,  have  an  idea  that  reviewing 
books  is  something  with  the  capacity  for  which  every  man 
is  born,  as  he  is  born  with  the  capacity  for  talking  prose. 
They  think  it  is  as  easy  as  having  opinions.  It  is  simply 
making  a  few  remarks  at  the  end  of  a  couple  of  hours  spent 
with  a  book  in  an  armchair.  Many  men  and  women — nov- 
elists, barristers,  professors  and  others — review  books  in 
their  spare  time,  as  they  look  on  this  as  work  they  can  do 

228 


BOOK  REVIEWING  229 

when  their  brains  are  too  tired  to  do  anything  which  is  of 
genuine  importance.  A  great  deal  of  book-reviewing  is 
done  contemptuously,  as  though  to  review  books  well  were 
not  as  difficult  as  to  do  anything  else  well.  This  is  perhaps 
due  in  some  measure  to  the  fact  that,  for  the  amount  of 
hard  work  it  involves,  book-reviewing  is  one  of  the  worst- 
paid  branches  of  journalism.  The  hero  of  Mr.  Beresford's 
new  novel,  The  Invisible  Event,  makes  an  income  of  £250 
a  year  as  an  outside  reviewer,  and  it  is  by  no  means  every 
outside  reviewer  who  makes  as  much  as  that  from  reviewing 
alone.  It  is  not  that  there  is  not  an  immense  public  which 
reads  book-reviews.  Mr.  T.  P.  O'Connor  showed  an  admir- 
able journalistic  instinct  when  twenty  years  or  so  ago  he 
filled  the  front  page  of  the  Weekly  Sun  with  a  long  book- 
review.  The  sale  of  the  Times  Literary  Supplement,  since 
it  became  a  separate  publication,  is  evidence  that,  for  good 
or  bad,  many  thousands  of  readers  have  acquired  the  habit 
of  reading  criticism  of  current  literature. 

But  I  do  not  think  that  the  mediocre  quality  of  most  book- 
reviewing  is  due  to  low  payment.  It  is  a  result,  I  believe, 
of  a  wrong  conception  of  what  a  book-review  should  be. 
My  own  opinion  is  that  a  review  should  be,  from  one  point 
of  view,  a  portrait  of  a  book.  It  should  present  the  book 
instead  of  merely  presenting  remarks  about  the  book.  In 
reviewing,  portraiture  is  more  important  than  opinion.  One 
has  to  get  the  reflexion  of  the  book,  and  not  a  mere  comment 
on  it,  down  on  paper.  Obviously,  one  must  not  press  this 
theory  of  portraiture  too  far.  It  is  useful  chiefly  as  a  pro- 
test against  the  curse  of  comment.  Many  clever  writers, 
when  they  come  to  write  book-reviews,  instead  of  portray- 
ing the  book,  waste  their  time  in  remarks  to  the  effect  that 
the  book  should  never  have  been  written,  and  so  forth. 
That,  in  fact,  is  the  usual  attitude  of  clever  reviewers  when 
they  begin.  They  are  so  horrified  to  find  that  Mr.  William 
Le  Queux  does  not  write  like  Dostoevsky  and  that  Mrs. 
Florence  Barclay  lacks  the  grandeur  of  Aeschylus  that  they 
run  amok  among  their  contemporaries  with  something  of 
the  furious  destructiveness  of  Don  Quixote  on  his  adven- 


230  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

tures.  It  is  the  noble  intolerance  of  youth;  but  how  unrea- 
sonable it  is!  Suppose  a  portrait-painter  were  suddenly  to 
take  his  sitter  by  the  throat  on  the  ground  that  he  had  no 
right  to  exist.  One  would  say  to  him  that  that  was  not  his 
business :  his  business  is  to  take  the  man's  existence  for 
granted,  and  to  paint  him  until  he  becomes  in  a  new  sense 
alive.  If  he  is  worthless,  paint  his  worthlessness,  but  do  not 
merely  comment  on  it.  There  is  no  reason  why  a  portrait 
should  be  flattering,  but  it  should  be  a  portrait.  It  may  be 
a  portrait  in  the  grand  matter,  or  a  portrait  in  caricature : 
if  it  expresses  its  subject  honestly  and  delightfully,  that  is 
all  we  can  ask  of  it.  A  critical  portrait  of  a  book  by  Mr. 
Le  Queux  may  be  amazingly  alive:  a  censorious  comment 
can  only  be  dull.  Mr.  Hubert  Bland  was  at  one  time  an 
almost  ideal  portrait-painter  of  commonplace  novels.  He 
obviously  liked  them,  as  the  caricaturist  likes  the  people  in 
the  street.  The  novels  themselves  might  not  be  readable, 
but  Mr.  Eland's  reviews  of  them  were.  He  could  reveal 
their  characteristics  in  a  few  strokes,  which  would  tell  you 
more  of  what  you  wanted  to  know  about  them  than  a  whole 
dictionary  of  adjectives  of  praise  and  blame.  One  could  tell 
at  a  glance  whether  the  book  had  any  literary  value,  whether 
it  was  worth  turning  to  as  a  stimulant,  whether  it  was  even 
intelligent  of  its  kind.  One  would  not  like  to  see  Mr. 
Eland's  method  too  slavishly  adopted  by  reviewers :  it  was 
suitable  only  for  portraying  certain  kinds  of  books.  But  it 
is  worth  recalling  as  the  method  of  a  man  who,  dealing  with 
books  that  were  for  the  most  part  insipid  and  worthless, 
made  his  reviews  delightfully  alive  as  well  as  admirably 
interpretative. 

The  comparison  of  a  review  to  a  portrait  fixes  attention 
on  one  essential  quality  of  a  book-review.  A  reviewer 
should  never  forget  his  responsibility  to  his  subject.  He 
must  allow  nothing  to  distract  him  from  his  main  task  of 
setting  down  the  features  of  his  book  vividly  and  recogniz- 
ably. One  may  say  this  even  while  admitting  that  the  most 
delightful  book-reviews  of  modern  times — for  the  literary 
causeries  of  Anatole  France  may  fairly  be  classified  as  book- 


BOOK  REVIEWING  231 

reviews — were  the  revolt  of  an  escaped  angel  against  the 
limitations  of  a  journalistic  form.  But  Anatole  France  hap- 
pens to  be  a  man  of  genius,  and  genius  is  a  justification  of 
any  method.  In  the  hands  of  a  pinchbeck  Anatole  France, 
how  unendurable  the  review  conceived  as  a  causerie  would 
become !  Anatole  France  observes  that  "  all  books  in  gen- 
eral, and  even  the  most  admirable,  seem  to  me  infinitely  less 
precious  for  what  they  contain  than  for  what  he  who  reads 
puts  into  them."  That,  in  a  sense,  is  true.  But  no  reviewer 
ought  to  believe  it.  His  duty  is  to  his  author:  whatever 
he  "  puts  into  him  "  is  a  subsidiary  matter.  "  The  critic," 
says  Anatole  France  again,  "  must  imbue  himself  thoroughly 
with  the  idea  that  every  book  has  as  many  different  aspects 
as  it  has  readers,  and  that  a  poem,  like  a  landscape,  is 
transformed  in  all  the  eyes  that  see  it,  in  all  the  souls  that 
conceive  it."  Here  he  gets  nearer  the  idea  of  criticism  as 
portraiture,  and  practically  every  critic  of  importance  has 
been  a  portrait-painter.  In  this  respect  Saint-Beuve  is  at 
one  with  Macaulay,  Pater  with  Matthew  Arnold,  Anatole 
France  (occasionally)  with  Henry  James.  They  may  por- 
tray authors  rather  than  books,  artists  rather  than  their 
work,  but  this  only  means  that  criticism  at  its  highest  is  a 
study  of  the  mind  of  the  artist  as  reflected  in  his  art. 

Clearly,  if  the  reviewer  can  paint  the  portrait  of  an 
author,  he  is  achieving  something  better  even  than  the  por- 
trait of  a  book.  But  what,  at  all  costs,  he  must  avoid 
doing  is  to  substitute  for  a  portrait  of  one  kind  or  another 
the  rag-bag  of  his  own  moral,  political  or  religious  opinions. 
It  is  one  of  the  most  difficult  things  in  the  world  for  anyone 
who  happens  to  hold  strong  opinions  not  to  make  the  mind 
of  Shakespeare  himself  a  pulpit  from  which  to  roar  them 
at  the  world.  Reviewers  with  theories  about  morality  and 
religion  can  seldom  be  induced  to  come  to  the  point  of  por- 
traiture until  they  have  enjoyed  a  preliminary  half -column 
of  self-explanation.  In  their  eyes  a  review  is  a  moral  essay 
rather  than  an  imaginative  interpretation.  In  dissenting 
from  this  view,  one  is  not  pleading  for  a  race  of  reviewers 
without  moral  or  religious  ideas,  or  even  prepossessions. 


232  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

One  is  merely  urging  that  in  a  review,  as  in  a  novel  or  a 
play,  the  moral  should  be  seated  at  the  heart  instead  of 
sprawling  all  over  the  surface.  In  the  well-worn  phrase, 
it  should  be  implicit,  not  explicit.  Undoubtedly  a  rare  critic 
of  genius  can  make  an  interesting  review-article  out  of  a 
statement  of  his  own  moral  and  political  ideas.  But  that 
only  justifies  the  article  as  an  essay,  not  as  a  review.  To 
many  reviewers — especially  in  the  bright  days  of  youth — 
it  seems  an  immensely  more  important  thing  to  write  a 
good  essay  than  a  good  review.  And  so  it  is,  but  not  when 
a  review  is  wanted.  It  is  a  far,  far  better  thing  to  write  a 
good  essay  about  America  than  a  good  review  of  a  book 
on  America.  But  the  one  should  not  be  substituted  for 
the  other.  If  one  takes  up  a  review  of  a  book  on  America 
by  Mr.  Wells  or  Mr.  Bennett,  it  is  in  ninety-nine  cases  out 
of  a  hundred  in  order  to  find  out  what  the  author  thinks, 
not  what  the  reviewer  thinks.  If  the  reviewer  begins  with 
a  paragraph  of  general  remarks  about  America — or,  worse 
still,  about  some  abstract  thing  like  liberty — he  is  almost 
invariably  wasting  paper.  I  believe  it  is  a  sound  rule  to 
destroy  all  preliminary  paragraphs  of  this  kind.  They  are 
detestable  in  almost  all  writing,  but  most  detestable  of  all 
in  book-reviews,  where  it  is  important  to  plunge  all  at  once 
into  the  middle  of  things.  I  say  this,  though  there  is  an 
occasional  book-reviewer  whose  preliminary  paragraphs  I 
would  not  miss  for  worlds.  But  one  has  even  known  book- 
reviewers  who  wrote  delightful  articles,  though  they  made 
scarcely  any  reference  to  the  books  under  review  at  all. 

To  my  mind,  nothing  more  clearly  shows  the  general 
misconception  of  the  purpose  of  a  book-review  than  the 
attitude  of  the  majority  of  journalists  to  the  quotational 
review.  It  is  the  custom  to  despise  the  quotational  review — 
to  dismiss  is  as  mere  "  gutting."  As  a  consequence,  it  is 
generally  very  badly  done.  It  is  done  as  if  under  the  impres- 
sion that  it  does  not  matter  what  quotations  one  gives  so 
long  as  one  fills  the  space.  One  great  paper  lends  support 
to  this  contemptuous  attitude  towards  quotational  criticism 
by  refusing  to  pay  its  contributors  for  space  taken  up  bv 


BOOK  REVIEWING  233 

quotations.  A  London  evening  newspaper  was  once  guilty 
of  the  same  folly.  A  reviewer  on  the  staff  of  the  latter 
confessed  to  me  that  to  the  present  day  he  finds  it  impos- 
sible, without  an  effort,  to  make  quotations  in  a  review, 
because  of  the  memory  of  those  days  when  to  quote  was  to 
add  to  one's  poverty.  Despised  work  is  seldom  done  well, 
and  it  is  not  surprising  that  it  is  almost  more  seldom  that 
one  finds  a  quotational  review  well  done  than  any  other  sort. 
Yet  how  critically  illuminating  a  quotation  may  be !  There 
are  many  books  in  regard  to  which  quotation  is  the  only 
criticism  necessary.  Books  of  memoirs  and  books  of  verse 
—the  least  artistic  as  well  as  the  most  artistic  forms  of  litera- 
ture— both  lend  themselves  to  it.  To  criticize  verse  without 
giving  quotations  is  to  leave  one  largely  in  ignorance  of  the 
quality  of  the  verse.  The  selection  of  passages  to  quote  is 
at  least  as  fine  a  test  of  artistic  judgment  as  any  comment 
the  critic  can  make.  In  regard  to  books  of  memoirs,  gos- 
sip, and  so  forth,  one  does  not  ask  for  a  test  of  delicate 
artistic  judgment.  Books  of  this  kind  should  simply  be 
rummaged  for  entertaining  "  news."  To  review  them  well 
is  to  make  an  anthology  of  (in  a  wide  sense)  amusing  pas- 
sages. There  is  no  other  way  to  portray  them.  And  yet  I 
have  known  a  very  brilliant  reviewer  take  a  book  of  gossip 
about  the  German  Court  and,  instead  of  quoting  any  of  the 
numerous  things  that  would  interest  people,  fill  half  a  col- 
umn with  abuse  of  the  way  in  which  the  book  was  written, 
of  the  inconsequence  of  the  chapters,  of  the  second-handed- 
ness  of  many  of  the  anecdotes.  Now,  I  do  not  object  to 
any  of  these  charges  being  brought.  Tt  is  well  that  "  made  " 
books  should  not  be  palmed  off  on  the  public  as  literature. 
On  the  other  hand,  a  mediocre  book  (from  the  point  of 
view  of  literature  or  history)  is  no  excuse  for  a  mediocre 
review.  No  matter  how  mediocre  a  book  is,  if  it  is  on  a 
subject  of  great  interest,  it  usually  contains  enough  vital 
matter  to  make  an  exciting  half -column.  Many  reviewers 
despise  a  bad  book  so  heartily  that,  instead  of  squeezing 
every  drop  of  interest  out  of  it,  as  they  ought  to  do,  they 
refrain  from  squeezing  a  single  drop  of  interest  out  of  it. 


234  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

They  are  frequently  people  who  suffer  from  anecdotophobia. 
"  Scorn  not  the  anecdote  "  is  a  motto  that  might  be  mod- 
estly hung  up  in  the  heart  of  every  reviewer.  After  all, 
Montaigne  did  not  scorn  it,  and  there  is  no  reason  why  the 
modern  journalist  should  be  ashamed  of  following  so  respec- 
table an  example.  One  can  quite  easily  understand  how  the 
gluttony  of  many  publishers  for  anecdotes  has  driven  writers 
with  a  respect  for  their  intellect  into  revolt.  But  let  us  not 
be  unjust  to  the  anecdote  because  it  has  been  cheapened 
through  no  fault  of  its  own.  We  may  be  sure  of  one  thing. 
A  review — a  review,  at  any  rate,  of  a  book  of  memoirs  or 
any  similar  kind  of  non-literary  book — which  contains  an 
anecdote  is  better  than  a  review  which  does  not  contain  an 
anecdote.  If  an  anecdotal  review  is  bad,  it  is  because  it  is 
badly  done,  not  because  it  is  anecdotal.  This,  one  might 
imagine,  is  too  obvious  to  require  saying;  but  many  men  of 
brains  go  through  life  without  ever  being  able  to  see  it. 

One  of  the  chief  virtues  of  the  anecdote  is  that  it  brings 
the  reviewer  down  from  his  generalizations  to  the  individual 
instances.  Generalizations  mixed  with  instances  make  a  fine 
sort  of  review,  but  to  flow  on  for  a  column  of  generalizations 
without  ever  pausing  to  light  them  into  life  with  instances, 
concrete  examples,  anecdotes,  is  to  write  not  a  book-review 
but  a  sermon.  Of  the  two,  the  sermon  is  much  the  easier 
to  write:  it  does  not  involve  the  trouble  of  constant  refer- 
ence to  one's  authorities.  Perhaps,  however,  someone  with 
practice  in  writing  sermons  will  argue  that  the  sermon  with- 
out instances  is  as  somniferous  as  the  book-review  with  the 
same  want.  Whether  that  it  so  or  not,  the  book-review  is 
not,  as  a  rule,  the  place  for  abstract  argument.  Not  that 
one  wants  to  shut  out  controversy.  There  is  no  pleasanter 
review  to  read  than  a  controversial  review.  Even  here, 
however,  one  demands  portrait  as  well  as  argument.  It  is, 
in  nine  cases  out  of  ten,  waste  of  time  to  assail  a  theory 
when  you  can  portray  a  man.  It  always  seems  to  me  to  be 
hopelessly  wrong  for  the  reviewer  of  biographies,  critical 
studies,  or  books  of  a  similar  kind,  to  allow  his  mind  to 
wander  from  the  main  figure  in  the  book  to  the  discussion 


BOOK  REVIEWING  235 

of  some  theory  or  other  that  has  been  incidentally  put  for- 
ward. Thus,  in  a  review  of  a  book  on  Stevenson,  the 
important  thing  is  to  reconstruct  the  figure  of  Stevenson, 
the  man  and  the  artist.  This  is  much  more  vitally  inter- 
esting and  relevant  than  theorizing  on  such  questions  as 
whether  the  writing  of  prose  or  of  poetry  is  the  more  diffi- 
cult art,  or  what  are  the  essential  characteristics  of  romance. 
These  and  many  other  questions  may  arise,  and  it  is  the 
proper  task  of  the  reviewer  to  discuss  them,  so  long  as  their 
discussion  is  kept  subordinate  to  the  portraiture  of  the  cen- 
tral figure.  But  they  must  not  be  allowed  to  push  the  lead- 
ing character  in  the  whole  business  right  out  of  the  review. 
If  they  are  brought  in  at  all,  they  must  be  brought  in,  like 
moral  sentiments,  inoffensively  by  the  way. 

In  pleading  that  a  review  should  be  a  portrait  of  a  book 
to  a  vastly  greater  degree  than  it  is  a  direct  comment  on  the 
book,  I  am  not  pleading  that  it  should  be  a  mere  bald  sum- 
mary. The  summary  kind  of  review  is  no  more  a  portrait 
than  is  the  Scotland  Yard  description  of  a  man  wanted  by 
the  police.  Portraiture  implies  selection  and  a  new  empha- 
sis. The  synopsis  of  the  plot  of  a  novel  is  as  far  from  being 
a  good  review  as  is  a  paragraph  of  general  comment  on  it. 
The  review  must  justify  itself,  not  as  a  reflection  of  dead 
bones,  but  by  a  new  life  of  its  own. 

Further,  I  am  not  pleading  for  the  suppression  of  com- 
ment and,  if  need  be,  condemnation.  But  either  to  praise 
or  condemn  without  instances  is  dull.  Neither  the  one  thing 
nor  the  other  is  the  chief  thing  in  the  review.  They  are 
the  crown  of  the  review,  but  not  its  life.  There  are  many 
critics  to  whom  condemnation  of  books  they  do  not  like 
seems  the  chief  end  of  man.  They  regard  themselves  as- 
engaged  upon  a  holy  war  against  the  Devil  and  his  works. 
Horace  complained  that  it  was  only  poets  who  were  not 
allowed  to  be  mediocre.  The  modern  critic — I  should  say 
the  modern  critic  of  the  censorious  kind,  not  the  critic  who 
looks  on  it  as  his  duty  to  puff  out  meaningless  superlatives 
over  every  book  that  appears — will  not  allow  any  author 
to  be  mediocre.  The  war  against  mediocrity  is  a  necessary 


236  THE  AET  OF  LETTERS 

war,  but  I  cannot  help  thinking  that  mediocrity  is  more 
likely  to  yield  to  humour  than  to  contemptuous  abuse.  Apart 
from  this,  it  is  the  reviewer's  part  to  maintain  high  stand- 
ards for  work  that  aims  at  being  literature,  rather  than  to 
career  about,  like  a  destroying  angel,  among  books  that  have 
no  such  aim.  Criticism,  Anatole  France  has  said,  is  the 
record  of  the  soul's  adventures  among  masterpieces.  Re- 
viewing, alas!  is  for  the  most  part  the  record  of  the  soul's 
adventures  among  books  that  are  the  reverse  of  master- 
pieces. What,  then,  are  his  standards  to  be?  Well,  a  man 
must  judge  linen  as  linen,  cotton  as  cotton,  and  shoddy  as 
shoddy.  It  is  ridiculous  to  denounce  any  of  them  for  not 
being  silk.  To  do  so  is  not  to  apply  high  standards  so  much 
as  to  apply  wrong  standards.  One  has  no  right  as  a  reviewer 
to  judge  a  book  by  any  standard  save  that  which  the  author 
aims  at  reaching.  As  a  private  reader,  one  has  the  right  to 
say  of  a  novel  by  Mr.  Joseph  Hocking,  for  instance  :  "  This 
is  not  literature.  This  is  not  realism.  This  does  not  interest 
me.  This  is  awful."  I  do  not  say  that  these  sentences  can 
be  fairly  used  of  any  of  Mr.  Hocking' s  novels.  I  merely 
take  him  as  an  example  of  a  popular  novelist  who  would 
be  bound  to  be  condemned  if  judged  by  comparison  with 
Flaubert  or  Meredith  or  even  Mr.  Galsworthy.  But  the 
reviewer  is  not  asked  to  state  whether  he  finds  Mr.  Hocking 
readable  so  much  as  to  state  the  kind  of  readableness  at 
which  Mr.  Hocking  aims  and  the  measure  of  his  success  in 
achieving  it.  It  is  the  reviewer's  business  to  discover  the 
quality  of  a  book  rather  than  to  keep  announcing  that  the 
quality  does  not  appeal  to  him.  Not  that  he  need  conceal 
the  fact  that  it  has  failed  to  appeal  to  him,  but  he  should 
remember  that  this  is  a  comparatively  irrelevant  matter. 
He  may  make  it  as  clear  as  day — indeed,  he  ought  to  make 
it  as  clear  as  day,  if  it  is  his  opinion — that  he  regards  the 
novels  of  Charles  Garvice  as  shoddy,  but  he  ought  also  to 
make  it  clear  whether  they  are  the  kind  of  shoddy  that 
serves  its  purpose. 

Is  this  to  lower  literary  standards?     I  do  not  think  so, 
for,  in  cases  of  this  kind,  one  is  not  judging  literature,  but 


BOOK  REVIEWING  237 

popular  books.  Those  to  whom  popular  books  are  anathema 
have  a  temperament  which  will  always  find  it  difficult  to  fall 
in  with  the  limitations  of  the  work  of  a  general  reviewer. 
The  curious  thing  is  that  this  intolerance  of  easy  writing  is 
most  generally  found  among  those  who  are  most  opposed 
to  intolerance  in  the  sphere  of  morals.  It  is  as  though  they 
had  escaped  from  one  sort  of  Puritanism  into  another. 
Personally,  I  do  not  see  why,  if  we  should  be  tolerant  of 
the  breach  of  a  moral  commandment,  we  should  not  be 
equally  tolerant  of  the  breach  of  a  literary  commandment. 
We  should  gently  scan,  not  only  our  brother  man,  but  our 
brother  author.  The  aesthete  of  to-day,  however,  will  look 
kindly  on  adultery,  but  show  all  the  harshness  of  a  Pilgrim 
Father  in  his  condemnation  of  a  split  infinitive.  I  cannot 
see  the  logic  of  this.  If  irregular  and  commonplace  people 
have  the  right  to  exist,  surely  irregular  and  commonplace 
books  have  a  right  to  exist  by  their  side. 

The  reviewer,  however,  is  often  led  into  a  false  attitude 
to  a  book,  not  by  its  bad  quality,  but  by  some  irrelevant 
quality — some  underlying  moral  or  political  idea.  He  de- 
nounces a  novel  the  moral  ideas  of  which  offend  him,  with- 
out giving  sufficient  consideration  to  the  success  or  failure 
of  the  novelist  in  the  effort  to  make  his  characters  live. 
Similarly,  he  praises  a  novel  with  the  moral  ideas  of  which 
he  agrees,  without  reflecting  that  perhaps  it  is  as  a  tract 
rather  than  as  a  work  of  art  that  it  has  given  him  pleasure. 
Both  the  praise  and  blame  which  have  been  heaped  upon 
Mr.  Kipling  are  largely  due  to  appreciation  or  dislike  of 
his  politics.  The  Imperialist  finds  his  heart  beating  faster 
as  he  reads  The  English  Flag,  and  he  praises  Mr.  Kipling 
as  an  artist  when  it  is  really  Mr.  Kipling  as  a  propagandist 
who  has  moved  him.  The  anti-Imperialist,  on  the  other 
hand,  is  often  led  by  detestation  of  Mr.  Kipling's  politics  to 
deny  even  the  palpable  fact  that  Mr.  Kipling  is  a  very  bril- 
liant short-story  teller.  It  is  for  the  reviewer  to  raise  him- 
self above  such  prejudices  and  to  discover  what  are  Mr. 
Kipling's  ideas  apart  from  his  art,  and  what  is  his  art  apart 
from  his  ideas. 


238  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

The  relation  between  one  and  the  other  is  also  clearly  a 
relevant  matter  for  discussion.  But  the  confusion  of  one 
with  the  other  is  fatal.  In  the  field  of  morals  we  are  per- 
haps led  astray  in  our  judgments  even  more  frequently  than 
in  matters  of  politics.  Mr.  Shaw's  plays  are  often  denounced 
by  critics  whom  they  have  made  laugh  till  their  sides  ached, 
and  the  reason  is  that,  after  leaving  the  theatre,  the  critics 
remember  that  they  do  not  like  Mr.  Shaw's  moral  ideas. 
In  the  same  way,  it  seems  to  me,  a  great  deal  of  the  praise 
that  has  been  given  to  Mr.  D.  H.  Lawrence  as  an  artist 
ought  really  to  be  given  to  him  as  a  distributor  of  certain 
moral  ideas.  That  he  has  studied  wonderfully  one  aspect 
of  human  nature,  that  he  can  describe  wonderfully  some 
aspects  of  external  nature,  I  know ;  but  I  doubt  whether  his 
art  is  fine  enough  or  sympathetic  enough  to  make  enthusi- 
astic anyone  who  differs  from  the  moral  attitude,  as  it  may 
be  called,  of  his  stories.  This  is  the  real  test  of  a  work  of 
art — has  it  sufficient  imaginative  vitality  to  capture  the 
imagination  of  artistic  readers  who  are  not  in  sympathy 
with  its  point  of  view?  The  Book  of  Job  survives  the  test: 
it  is  a  book  to  the  spell  of  which  no  imaginative  man  could 
be  indifferent,  whether  Christian,  Jew  or  atheist.  Similarly, 
Shelley  is  read  and  written  about  with  enthusiasm  by  many 
who  hold  moral,  religious,  and  political  ideas  directly  con- 
trary to  his  own.  Mr.  Kipling's  Recessional,  with  its  sombre 
imaginative  glow,  its  recapturing  of  Old  Testament  prides 
and  fears,  commands  the  praise  of  thousands  to  whom 
much  of  the  rest  of  his  poetry  is  the  abominable  thing.  It 
is  the  reviewer's  task  to  discover  imagination  even  in  those 
who  are  the  enemies  of  the  ideas  he  cherishes.  In  so  far  as 
he  cannot  do  this,  he  fails  in  his  business  as  a  critic  of 
the  arts. 

It  may  be  said  in  answer  to  all  this,  however,  that  to 
appeal  for  tolerance  in  book-reviewers  is  not  necessary.  The 
Press  is  already  overcrowded  with  laudations  of  common- 
place books.  Not  a  day  passes  but  at  least  a  dozen  books 
are  praised  as  having  "  not  a  dull  moment,"  being  "  readable 
from  cover  to  cover,"  and  as  reminding  the  reviewer  of 


BOOK  REVIEWING  239 

Stevenson,  Meredith,  Oscar  Wilde,  Paul  de  Kock,  and  Jane 
Austen.  That  is  not  the  kind  of  tolerance  which  one  is 
eager  to  see.  That  kind  of  review  is  scarcely  different  from 
a  publisher's  advertisement.  Besides,  it  usually  sins  in  being 
mere  summary  and  comment,  or  even  comment  without 
summary.  It  is  a  thoughtless  scattering  of  acceptable  words 
and  is  as  unlike  the  review  conceived  as  a  portrait  as  is  the 
hostile  kind  of  commentatory  review  which  I  have  been 
discussing.  It  is  generally  the  comment  of  a  lazy  brain, 
instead  of  being,  like  the  other,  the  comment  of  a  clever 
brain.  Praise  is  the  vice  of  the  commonplace  reviewer,  just 
as  censoriousness  is  the  vice  of  the  more  clever  sort.  Not 
that  one  wishes  either  praise  or  censure  to  be  stinted.  One 
is  merely  anxious  not  to  see  them  misapplied.  It  is  a  vice, 
not  a  virtue,  of  reviewing  to  be  lukewarm  either  in  the  one 
or  the  other.  What  one  desires  most  of  all  in  a  reviewer, 
after  a  capacity  to  portray  books,  is  the  courage  of  his  opin- 
ions, so  that,  whether  he  is  face  to  face  with  an  old  reputa- 
tion like  Mr.  Conrad's  or  a  new  reputation  like  Mr.  Mac- 
kenzie's, he  will  boldly  express  his  enthusiasms  and  his 
dissatisfactions  without  regard  to  the  estimate  of  the  author, 
which  is,  for  the  moment,  "  in  the  air."  What  seems  to  be 
wanted,  then,  in  a  book-reviewer  is  that,  without  being 
servile,  he  should  be  swift  to  praise,  and  that,  without  being 
censorious,  he  should  have  the  courage  to  blame.  While 
tolerant  of  kinds  in  literature,  he  should  be  intolerant  of 
pretentiousness.  He  should  be  less  patient,  for  instance,  of 
a  pseudo-Milton  than  of  a  writer  who  frankly  aimed  at 
nothing  higher  than  a  book  of  music-hall  songs.  He  should 
be  more  eager  to  define  the  qualities  of  a  book  than  to  heap 
comment  upon  comment.  If — I  hope  the  image  is  not  too 
strained — he  draws  a  book  from  the  life,  he  will  produce  a 
better  review  than  if  he  spends  his  time  calling  it  names, 
whether  foul  or  fair. 

But  what  of  the  equipment  of  the  reviewer?  it  may  be 
asked.  What  of  his  standards?  One  of  the  faults  of  mod- 
ern reviewing  seems  to  me  to  be  that  the  standards  of  many 
critics  are  derived  almost  entirely  from  the  literature  of 


240  THE  ART  OF  LETTERS 

the  last  thirty  years.  This  is  especially  so  with  some  Amer- 
ican critics,  who  rush  feverishly  into  print  with  volumes 
spotted  with  the  names  of  modern  writers  as  Christmas 
pudding  is  spotted  with  currants.  To  read  them  is  to  get 
the  impression  that  the  world  is  only  a  hundred  years  old. 
It  seems  to  me  that  Matthew  Arnold  was  right  when  he 
urged  men  to  turn  to  the  classics  for  their  standards.  His 
definition  of  the  classics  may  have  been  too  narrow,  and 
nothing  could  be  more  utterly  dead  than  a  criticism  which 
tries  to  measure  imaginary  literature  by  an  academic  stand- 
ard or  the  rules  of  Aristotle.  But  it  is  only  those  to  whom 
the  classics  are  themselves  dead  who  are  likely  to  lay  this 
academic  dead  hand  on  new  literature.  Besides,  even  the 
most  academic  standards  are  valuable  in  a  world  in  which 
chaos  is  hailed  with  enthusiasm  both  in  art  and  in  politics. 
But,  when  all  is  said,  the  taste  which  is  the  essential  quality 
of  a  critic  is  something  with  which  he  is  born.  It  is  some- 
thing which  is  not  born  of  reading  Sophocles  and  Plato  and 
does  not  perish  of  reading  Miss  Marie  Corelli.  This  taste 
must  illuminate  all  the  reviewer's  portraits.  Without  it, 
he  had  far  better  be  a  coach-builder  than  a  reviewer  of 
books.  It  is  this  taste  in  the  background  that  gives  distinc- 
tion to  a  tolerant  and  humorous  review  of  even  the  most 
unambitious  detective  story. 


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